I Love Asphalt 8 Airborne But I’ll Stop Playing Now

I think I discovered Asphalt on the iPad when Asphalt 6 came out and I absolutely loved it.

Asphalt 7 came along and it was better in every way and I completed this as I had done with Asphalt 6, raced everything, got all the stars, upgraded all the cars.

That’s the really satisfying thing about these games, you enjoy playing but you also gain a sense of accomplishment by maxing everything out, getting 5 stars on all tracks and being finished. Being finished, that’s the achievement. You may not have got up to the maximum driver stats but you did everything and for the most part did it all very well or perfectly.

Asphalt 8 is magnificent. What a stunning game on the iPad, the graphics are best of breed, the soundtrack is something I listen to when I’m not playing, great song choices, bands I would have never discovered. Asphalt 8 Airborne is a credit to the business people and especially the designers and developers behind it, simply stunning. There’s been no game App that I have played for as many hours and from which I have gained such great enjoyment.

The latest releases gave us a beautiful futuristic up-in-the-sky race track, wonderful! There are now Pro Kits for the existing cars you have and now there are Tokens as well as the Credits.

We didn’t need Tokens or Pro Boxes and we certainly don’t need the Aero Premium Car Pack for $129.99 AUD.

I’ve spent $391.81 on Asphalt games and $385.33 of that has been on Asphalt 8. I added up all iTunes receipts from email that mentioned Asphalt. The most recent purchase, on special, was 3,000,000 credits for $49.99 because there’s an area in the game now where you can only race if you’ve maxed out the car, like upgraded every aspect of that particular car.

I realised that I was probably going to be able to max out two or three cars and only if I max out the ones that I have partially maxed out already. And that’s without actually buying one of the cars for 3,000,00 credits and god knows how much it would then cost to max out that car’s attributes. You can race of course, and earn credits but if you’re an adult you probably have other stuff you must do other than play Asphalt.

Just quickly, if you win a race you can earn about 3600 credits and it takes about 3 minutes. So if you want to play to get your 3,000,000 credits instead of buying them you need to spend about 2500 minutes playing. Yes, that’s about 41 hours, closer to 42 and I just don’t have the time and really that’s only going to allow you to upgrade and max out one car.

The Aero Premium Car Pack I mentioned earlier, you can’t work to gain that, there’s no choice but to buy two cars for $129.99 and if you want to have all the Car packs complete you’ll need to pay cash for the Pole Position Pack, $32.99 as well. If I needed to max out all the cars so I could complete that season I estimate I’d need 86,000,000 credits. I have 43 cars that are not maxed out and I’m allowing 2,000,000 credits for each car to be upgraded and maxed out. Normally 3,000,000 credits are $129.99 AUD so I would need to spend about $3,700 AUD to buy enough credits to upgrade everything, even if I halve that, $1,800 is too much and there are likely to be new cars introduced along the way.

Then there are the Pro Kits which you can buy Tokens to get so there’s bound to be a season where you can only play if the car is fully Pro.

And to top it all off, they’re now making us watch advertisements. I think I’ve paid enough to be spared the ads.

So, I give up. I’m going to spend my 3,000,000 credits upgrading a few of my favourite cars. I’m going to enjoy a few events and some multiplayer races, which are great fun. I can’t afford the time or the money to have the sense of achievement that comes from completing this game, so, I’m disappointed but for me the sense of working towards an end, a completion of everything was what drove me to keep going, when that’s unreachable I’ll stop.

If you haven’t tried Asphalt, do yourself a favour, it’s the best car racing game and I’ve tried them all, just don’t start buying your way to the end, only buy if you really want that one thing, that fabulous car perhaps.

I have one spot on my home screen for my favourite game and as 2015 starts I’m not sure what that’s going to be but it won’t be Asphalt 8 Airborne any more.

UPDATE – Check out Jamie’s article on Medium for estimates on the total cost of buying your way to finishing, so silly of them in my view.