Mobile Games Roundup
Asphalt! Tiger! Fight! Harbour! NOVA!
Asphalt 6: Adrenaline
Despite Asphalt 6 appearing on every platform known to mankind, I've never had more than a flicker of interest in featuring Gameloft's rather unapologetic Burnout clone in this column. Aside from looking like it was made around 10 years ago, racing games are usually about as suited to touch-screen platforms as a fork is to a bowl of soup.
But with the game's arrival on Xperia Play I was curious whether being able to control it with actual buttons would suddenly transform it into something to get excited about.
Sadly the answer is a resounding "no".
That's not to say Asphalt 6 is a disaster - it's just one of those rather anonymous arcade racing games that struggles to do anything that hasn't been done much better dozens of times before.
The fact that it includes dozens of races, dozens of vehicles to drive and even online or local multiplayer rather fades into the rear view when the core racing experience is so underwhelming. Even when you're blasting past opponents and scattering them like leaves in your wake, at no stage does anything about the game rise above the level of basic competence.
Perhaps it's the slightly tacky look. Perhaps it's the unsatisfying drift handling - buttons or no buttons. Perhaps I'm just being a gigantic misery guts and can't appreciate that for a budget mobile racing game it's not that bad.
Whatever it is, this is one of those occasions when it feels like you're getting exactly what you paid for: a cheap knock-off.
4/10
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12
As I scribe, Flick Golf stands like a straddling colossus at the top of the Paid Apps chart on both iPhone and iPad, pointing and laughing at the tiny ants scurrying around its feet. There's a very good reason for this: it's ridiculously addictive. As anyone who has lost hours to Flick Kick Football will attest, games like these are grounds for divorce.
You'd think with its resources and vast experience making golfing video games that EA would be able to come along and wipe the floor with the competition, and yet its latest attempt to woo us feels strangely flat by comparison.
At first glance you'd be hard-pressed to see much wrong with it. Technically it's the best golf game around, with eight crisp and detailed courses, four gameplay modes, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth multiplayer, and challenges galore. You certainly can't fault it for features.
But it's the game's evident determination to be realistic that is likely to prove divisive. It provides plenty of scope for control depth and flexibility, but in doing so fails to capture the intuitive feel that makes you want to play something like Flick Golf until your eyeballs fall out.
Put simply, Tiger Woods takes time and effort to get the most out of, thanks to a timing and aiming system that - at first - isn't quite as easy to grasp as it could be (the game could certainly do a better job of explaining itself, too).
If you're prepared to expend the requisite effort, there's a decent game of golf to be had here, but there's substantial room for improvement.
7/10