What is it?

3D racing with decent graphics, neat gameplay extras and ever-increasing challenges.

What’s it good for?

Hurtling around the track, dodging cars, evading police and grabbing first place!

Judgement time…

Racing games are ripe for a resurgence on mobiles, but Asphalt 3 falls slighly short of expectations.

In gameplay terms it’s great. Cars are easy to control (until you skid them into a spin), rival vehicles adjust to your attempts to pass them, and the police make a valiant effort to slow you down too. But it’s the graphics that really let this game down.

Don’t get us wrong: what you’ll see from Asphalt 3 is a 3D environment, with cars able to spin, flip and roll, rather than just turn corners. Likewise, racing environments are well made, but the overall feel of the game’s graphics makes it look weak. There’s little here to tell you this is an N-Gage game. It simply looks like a (rather good) Java game.

Asphalt 3’s graphics also began to judder as we pushed out car to its top speed, with stuttering frame rates far from the silky-smooth N-Gage performance we’ve been promised.

If you can overlook the graphical fumbling, however, it’s a solid racer. There’s plenty of opportunity to tweak your car and a multiplayer mode is a wonderful addition.

If you’re looking for a true next-gen mobile racer though, we’d wait for the next one to come along.