In the debate of the best racers on the iPhone platform, titles such as Real Racing and Need for Speed: Undercover are likely to come up. You may want to add one more to the debate — Gameloft’s newly released Asphalt 5 is simply an adrenaline rush in your pocket. On the fun meter, Asphalt 5 definitely delivers with strong sense of speed. But, while the game delivers a solid overall racing experience with a good amount of content and responsive controls, the graphics and animation do keep it a notch below the others.

On that note, the first thing that hits you is the graphics. Even though they may not be the smoothest (on a 2G iPod) on the platform, they do pop off the screen, which makes a difference when you’re careening through tracks and dealing with oncoming traffic from all sides. Framerate aside, even though you may not be focused on the details, Gameloft obviously has. Whether racing through snow-covered freeways, mud soaked roads, or the darkness of night, the details are everywhere. From the signs on storefronts to damage on vehicles, Gameloft has definitely spent a good deal of development creating an arcade experience with good degree of visuals. The perky soundtrack is a keeper, although you can play your own music if you’re into something a little more gut wrenching.

The objective of Asphalt 5 is simple: win races and earn money to soup up your ride. Of course, you’ll face a variety of obstacles including oncoming traffic, innocent bystanders, and police in addition to varying weather conditions such as snow and rain. This can all be experienced through 3 different camera angles: close, far and bumper. Bumper provides a driver’s seat view which can be quite intense with every bump and crash.

The game takes you through 12 different locations including Aspen, St. Tropez, Athens and Las Vegas. The well-designed tracks offer different terrains and environmental conditions, and most importantly, shortcuts. These shortcuts, which can be seen on the mini-map, are a good addition allowing players the option of sticking to the standard track or risking it by taking a shorter yet tighter path. In some cases, these shortcuts are the only way to succeed especially in the time-sensitive races.

Asphalt 5 has three game modes: Single Race, Career and Local/Online Multiplayer. For many, Single Race will be the first taste of Asphalt 5 which provides a quick multi-lap race through the track of your choosing. While Single Race provides a good setting to practice driving skills, winning doesn’t unlock new tracks or earn money.

Online multiplayer provides a number of options which includes competing against up to six players in a single race. In our brief time with the game, the online experience was smooth with minimal performance issues, and joining or hosting a race is relatively easy.

Meanwhile, Career is the guts of Asphalt 5, and where winning matters. Whether unlocking tracks, picking up women, or earning money, Career is where you do it facing 8 different racing events. And once tracks are unlocked in Career, they become available in Single Race.

With a variety of challenging racing events (time trial, cop chase, escape, drift and more), Asphalt 5 has 33 licensed cars and motorcycles potentially at your disposal. From Lamborghinis and Ferraris to Ducatis and Kawasakis, winning races and earning cash will give you access to many of these vehicles for a price. The default vehicles are the Mini Cooper S and Nissan 370Z, and all vehicles are stored in the Garage section. If you want to cut through all that, playing online through Gameloft Live will provide full access to all the vehicles for competing against others or in individual time trials.

Cash can be used to upgrade vehicles in three areas: engine, handling and boost. And you’ll find there are numerous other ways to customize your vehicle. For example, paint jobs can be altered using the color slider and decals can be applied. Earning cash goes beyond winning races although that’s a big part of it. Cash is also earned by collecting tokens on the roadway, near misses with other vehicles, drifting, jumping, and eliminations.

Asphalt 5 provides a responsive set of controls, and in general, the handling is highly accurate. The game consists of three types of controls: wheel, screen tap, and accelerometer. Choosing the accelerometer controls allows you to turn on/off auto acceleration. Of the three, the accelerometer feels the most natural with screen tapping the most awkward. With auto acceleration turned off, a brake pad appears, although I rarely used my brakes except when wanting score style points for drifting.

Gameplay video from Japanese version recorded by AppBank:

When it comes to gameplay, Asphalt 5 does what it’s supposed to do—provide a good sense of speed. The different race types certainly offer variety, and a replay function is included at the end of each race to review the race, although replays can’t be saved. The AI in Asphalt 5 feels well balanced providing enough aggressive driving to keep it interesting but not overdoing it either to make it impossible. The controls make steering and handling relatively easy, and most won’t have issues picking them up. The game is fairly forgiving when it comes to crashing into objects, however, crashing into oncoming traffic tends to have more severe consequences by stalling your momentum and losing position in the race.

Overall, Asphalt 5 definitely delivers on the fun meter. The controls and content really makes this a racer accessible to everyone. Aside from the middling (though acceptable) framerate on earlier generation devices, Asphalt 5 is solid arcade racer with quality graphics. With a variety of different races, a relatively balanced AI, online multiplayer and a great feeling of speed, Asphalt 5 comes highly recommended.

App Store Link: Asphalt 5, $6.99

Fish Labs' long awaited rally racer that we first heard of back in August has finally arrived on the App Store. Originally a J2ME game released in 2008 that received rave reviews from mobile gaming sites, Rally Master Pro 3D [App Store] for the iPhone is completely remastered with four times the polygon count of the original with all kinds of additional visual effects.

The extra once-over Fish Labs gave Rally Master Pro 3D is amazingly apparent from your first launch of the game. It looks absolutely gorgeous and can easily stand next to the other graphical marvels of the App Store. Your car is one of the best looking car models I've seen on the platform, the weather effects look excellent, the draw distance is far, and pop-in of scenery is minimal. From a technical standpoint, Rally Master Pro 3D is phenomenal.

The game is controlled similar to other racing games. Your steer your car either by tilting your phone, using an analog wheel, or digital buttons to turn right or left. Acceleration can either be handled automatically or via a button, and there is a button for braking. I've found myself preferring the buttons to steer right and left, which seems a little odd as tilt controls have worked so well with other games. Both tilting and using the analog wheel somehow feel significantly less precise than using the digital controls.

When you're doing well, racing through the countryside in Rally Master Pro 3D feels great. As a rally game, you are competing against the clock rather than other racers, and like other rally games, turns are called out and the tracks are mostly easy to navigate with plenty of turns and jumps. Where things start to go pear shaped is when your tires slip off the road, which is where the car damage system comes in.

If you don't maintain a perfect racing line, your car slows significantly whenever you even slightly veer off the road. On top of that, a bar showing your car's current durability is displayed on the top left corner of the screen. In addition to being slowed when you go off road, your car takes constant damage and must be repaired between races.

When I first noticed my car taking damage for sliding off the edge of the track through turns, I suspected that there was going to be some really slick multitouch enabled mini game where you used various gestures to repair your car or some other clever way to play as a member of your pit crew. Instead, you're offered two options– You can either have the game repair automatically to repair some lost durability, or assist the pit crew by playing timing based mini games to do things like refill your tire pressure or tighten the lug nuts of your wheels to repair much more.

What could have been a neat gameplay mechanic similar to how you hot wire cars in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars for the DS instead is accomplished by just pressing a virtual button on screen. When you're refilling your tires you hold a button to add or release air in to your tires and must guess the correct duration to get the pressure gauge within the desired range. When tightening lug nuts, you simply tap a button when a series of lines match up inside of a bar similar to how you putt in most golfing games.

What could have been a great opportunity to inject some mini games that suit the unique controls of the iPhone instead just come off as shallow and contrived. The vehicle durability and repair system really seem to be the fly in the ointment of an otherwise phenomenal iPhone game.

At the end of the day, Rally Master Pro 3D is still worth checking out. It's a fun racing game with great graphics. Once you eventually get good enough at the game your car doesn't take very much damage, and you can begin to mostly ignore the durability system. There is a ton to unlock by playing through the three difficulties of career mode, each with a rally course set up over 9 individual legs. Times are tracked locally as well as online, creating a sizable amount of replay value if you enjoy competing in online leaderboards.

App Store Link: Rally Master Pro 3D, $6.99

TouchArcade Rating:

Volkswagen and Firemint's Real Racing GTI free promotional game for the iPhone has been released to the App Store. The 59.3MB download offers a Volkswagen branded racing experience with one main track and six 2010 GTI sport hatches.

The free Real Racing GTI App is available worldwide and spares no detail, allowing players to experience every thrilling aspect of the all-new 2010 GTI right in the palms of their hands on iPhone and iPod touch. From the redesigned exterior with more aggressive headlights and the famous red-striped grille, to the sporty interior with a race-inspired steering wheel, the all-new 2010 GTI races its way to life on the screen for a thrilling gaming experience.

The three game modes include Quick Race, Time Trial, and GTI Cup Championship (across three tracks). Aside from being a great ad for Volkswagen, Real Racing GTI also serves as the Lite version of Firemint's widely acclaimed Real Racing [$6.99].

As part of the launch promotion, Volkswagen is giving away six limited edition 2010 Volkswagen GTI MarkVI prize cars to six U.S. players of the game. Details of the giveaway will be posted at http://www.VW.com/RealRacingGTI.

We loved the full version of the game, so this free Lite version is a "must try" for anyone who hasn't played the game yet.

App Store Link: Real Racing GTI, Free, Real Racing, $6.99

Volkswagen held a press conference in New York City tonight for the launch of the Volkswagen 2010 GTI. During the presentation, they announced Real Racing GTI a free iPhone game based on Firemint's Real Racing game.

Announcing the all-new 2010 GTI! But this is [no] ordinary announcement. Breaking the traditional mold, the all-new 2010 GTI is the first car to be launched through an iPhone / iPod Touch app!

VW teams up with Firemint to present a special GTI edition of the award-winning Real Racing app! Log on to the App Store tomorrow morning to pick up your FREE copy of Real Racing GTI

The game will be free to download and should appear in the App Store by the morning.

Part of the presentation was recorded live here, talk of the app starts at about 7 minutes in, gameplay at around 10 min 30 seconds in:

The free game will presumably serve as both a promotional app for Volkswagen as well as a lite version of Firemint's Real Racing [$6.99]. We expect more official information to be released soon.

Update: Now available!

Ground Effect, developed by Glenn Corpes, has been in development for a few months now. Posting as "GlennX" on our forums, Corpes has posted constant updates since May of this year, along with utilizing the Touch Arcade community as a beta testing pool. It's always great to see projects like this with so much involvement from our forums, and having played a preview build, it seems that polling the community has paid off.

Ground Efect is an arcade style Ekranoplan racing game that takes place around a series of 14 different sets of islands. The relative simplicity of the geometry of these islands allows for an extremely impressive draw distance in the game along with silky smooth framerates on my iPhone 3GS. The game is controlled utilizing either tilt or touch controls, and they work just as well as all the other racing games on the platform. Acceleration is handled automatically, but there are two on screen buttons for boosting and braking. Doing well in the game requires intelligent management of boost, which slowly recharges when you're not using it.

Ground Effect features atmospheric music from the Danish band Diefenbach, which fits perfectly with the mood of the game, 10 different race craft to choose from, along with both daytime and night races. According to the developer, this fun arcade racer is only a few more days worth of tweaks and unless a beta tester finds a major bug, Ground Effect will be submitted to Apple very soon.

If you have questions about the game, feel free to stop by GlennX's latest thread on Ground Effect on our forums.

This week, 2XL Games' highly anticipated off-road racing game 2XL ATV Offroad [link] hit the App Store.  The game is a follow-up to the studio's 2XL Supercross, a technically impressive dirt-track racing title that, physics and visuals aside, felt a little shallow from an overall gameplay perspective.  We're happy to report that this latest from 2XL Games takes all of the "good" from Supercross and combines it with highly varied tracks, a proper career mode, and Wi-Fi multiplayer to deliver one of the very best racers in the App Store.

ATV Offroad features three different track types in which to compete.  Supercross tracks, much like those featured in 2XL Supercross are represented but, in addition, an array of Nationals (outdoor tracks) and Freestyle (it's like stunt racing in a massive fossile pit) tracks have been added to the mix.  Whatever track type you're racing in, the visuals are breathtaking — especially in the two outdoor types.  From the impressive draw distance to the overall smoothness of the onscreen action to the clouds of dust kicked up by your competitors, the game is an iPhone eye-candy carnival that the PSP has reason to envy.  The visual experience takes me back to the ATV Offroad Fury series on the PS2, but with a better sense of speed.  Yes, this truly is one of the most visually impressive games available for the iPhone.  It is absolutely a full console experience.

The game features an Arcade mode, which allows racing among any of the 16 available tracks across Supercross, Nationals, and Freestyle, as well as a Career mode (which is really the core playmode) and a Wi-Fi multiplayer mode (with Bluetooth on the way).  Online leaderboards provide a skill incentive.

Career mode involves moving through a sequence of 11 Leagues which are events of varied track combinations.  Rank high enough and the next League is unlocked.  I've spent a great deal of time playing rather deep into the title and can tell you that, at Medium difficulty anyway, it's not a cakewalk.  The challenge is apparent and requires some real skill to League up.  But the journey to victory is a most satisfying one.  The requisite track replays to get the needed ranking are nothing but enjoyable.  Adding to the experience is an extensive achievement system that rewards players for skill on the track along the way.

The two available Freestyle tracks, in whichever mode you encounter them, are solo free-for-all's in a large, terraced pit.  The goal here is to perform as many tricks as possible to rack up points and medal up from bronze to gold.  It's kind of a Tony Hawk experience on an ATV.  The draw-distance and physics system exhibited here are impressive.

The game's default control mode is accelerometer tilt, but a virtual stick is available as well.  I find the former to be far superior to the latter in any mode of gameplay.  Tilt control in this title has been very well tuned and offers excellent vehicle control.

In any playmode you can choose from among 15 different drivers and 15 different ATVs to get the race done.  The variation that these choices provide are simply visual rather than physical, but it's nice to have choices.  And adding to the experience is an impressive sound system that does a great job of letting you know just where the encroaching competitors are on the track behind you.

See the developer's gameplay video for a closer look.

I am a particular fan of offroad racing games.  I enjoy the heightened in-game physics that they exhibit and don't at all mind a little travel on the Z-axis (jump, jump, jump).  That said, this is my favorite racing game available for the iPhone.  And the replay value is significant.  Anyone who enjoys a solid, well-rounded racer — and offroad racing in particular — would be a fool to let 2XL Offroad Racing pass them by.

App Store Link: 2XL ATV Offroad, $7.99

TouchArcade Rating:

Jonathan Lanis has recently contributed a simple and fun bit of 3D obstacle-dodging tunnel madness to the App Store in the form of Boost 3D [link].

Boost 3D is about tunnels, and it's a rather simple affair.  You start out racing down the inside of an obstacle-laden tunnel and, before you know it, you're racing down the outside of an obstacle-laden tunnel, tilting left and right, trying to keep from careening into varying arrangements of colorful blocks.  There are boost pads that lend speed to your travel, as well as granting the ability to crash through an obstacle.  Granted, it sounds pretty same-old, same-old — I mean, there're plenty of hurtle-down-a-tunnel games in the App Store — but somehow, Boost 3D stands above the pack.  It has a certain stylized, simple charm that makes it feel unique.  Not to mention the glass-smooth framerate.

That said, it could be more of a game.  You start down the tunnel, racking up points the further you go.  The track and obstacles change along the way, but it's a one-shot run.  I think the addition of end goals and levelling would add significantly to the game.  But, still, among the iPhone tunnel games, Boost 3D is king, or close to the same.  It's genuinely hard to put down.

See the developer's gameplay video, which is silent, unlike the game.

App Store Link: Boost 3D, $1.99

TouchArcade Rating:

2XL Games' much anticipated ATV game was released into the App Store tonight for $7.99.

The game represents 2XL's followup title to the technically impressive 2XL Supercross and seems to share the same graphics engine. Beyond moving to ATV's, however, 2XL has added a lot of content to this new title, including freestyle levels, career mode, local multiplayer, online leaderboards and more.

The game offers tilt controls with a large number of customizable settings, though the default controls seemed to work reasonably well on our first few spins around the track.

The game shares the same impressive graphics seen in the original 2XL Supercross and are well demonstrated in this hands-on video provided by the developers.

Superficially, the biggest addition to the game is a full career mode that was conspicuously absent from their freshman iPhone release. 2XL ATV Offroad offers 16 ATV Supercross and Outdoor Nationals tracks and 2 Freestyle levels, and 3 levels of difficulty.

We'll be able to spend some more time with the title now that it's been released. Early adopters can share their impressions in our forums.

App Store Link: 2XL ATV Offroad, $7.99

The battle of the iPhone Kart racers continues with the release of Shrek Kart [App Store] to the App Store.

Shrek Kart contains 10 different karts, 11 different powerups, 15 tracks, single player and arena modes. There is local 6-way multiplayer but no online play. While it might have been an instant purchase in the past, the recent release of Konami Krazy Karts and surprise release of online multiplayer Cocoto Kart might make your decision harder.

Here's a hands on video:

We'll provide a closer look after we've had some time with the game, but early impressions are being collected in our forums.

App Store Link: Shrek Kart, $4.99

Back in August we reported that FishLabs would be bringing the highly rated mobile title Rally Master Pro, which Pocket Gamer determined to be the best mobile game of 2008, to the iPhone and iPod touch.

The original mobile title has some of the best 3D graphics ever seen on a typical handset.  The iPhone version, as FishLabs indicates, takes things to a whole new level with 4x the poly count of the original and enhanced particle effects and dynamic lighting.

Depending on the track surface and weather, a variety of dust, spray, and even dirt particles will be generated for each individual tire. The various kinds of particles act quite differently. On dry, dusty tracks the car leaves a massive cloud of dust while racing through a forest on a rainy day you can literrally see the mud flying.
….
Thanks to the high-powered 3D chips (OpenGL graphics acceleration) in the iPhone, we can light the vehicle in a variety of ways, depending on the weather: with lots of light and shadows when it’s sunny, diffuse when the sky is overcast, and correspondingly dim in rain and storm.

The iPhone release will include 27 courses and weather effects for sun, rain, and snow as well as options for tilt or touch (analog or digital) controls.

FishLabs was kind enough to provide us with a pre-release build of the iPhone version of Rally Master Pro to play around with and share a glimpse with our readers.

See our brief gameplay video that shows early play across several different tracks.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

The developers emphasis that what you see above is indeed a pre-release with unfinalized controls, physics, and sound.  As such, I'll refrain from critiquing the gameplay, but I can say that I've had a rather enjoyable time putting the game through its paces.  Some parts of the various courses really take me back to days of spending hours in front of Sega Rally on the Saturn (which, in case you've not personally had the pleasure, is a very good thing).

What I've seen so far puts a rather optimistic light on the likelihood that the iPhone version will indeed go well beyond the mobile title.

FishLabs indicates that Rally Master Pro will hit the App Store sometime this autumn.