Each time you complete one of the racing challenges or level up in Asphalt 7: Heat, the new iOS racing game prompts you with a "share your results" screen that ties into Facebook. Since it's quite easy to earn experience points or clear challenge requirements, I often found myself tapping the "no thanks" button on the share screen three or four times after every race.

Asphalt forces you to click through this barrage of screens even if you've elected not to connect your social media accounts to it. It makes no pretense that the share button is there because it's something players would actually want to do. It's something Gameloft wants you to do, and it will punish you with pop-up windows to hammer down your resolve.

What Gameloft doesn't seem to understand is that there isn't a single person I know who would care about my performance in Asphalt 7. I can't even fathom a scenario in which someone congratulated me on my totally rad race time in the second event of cup number six.

It's become standard practice in games to plead with players to tweet about their progress, but most games at least have the decency of leaving players alone if they choose not to participate. Not Asphalt 7.

Asphalt 7: Heat is a racing game that, like much of Gameloft's output, cribs liberally from other successful games. It's got Burnout's slo-mo takedowns, Jetpack Joyride's copious challenges and every other iOS game ever made's three-star ranking system.

The rest of its features are rather predictable: Win the race, take down five opponents, survive the elimination round, beat the time trial, drift a bunch. You've played Asphalt 7 before – just not on your iPhone.

Asphalt 7 has in-app purchases, but I can't imagine anyone ever spending money on them. Even if you buy the $100 pack of 200 stars, that still won't unlock everything in the game; not by a long shot. So what's the point?

In-app purchases, developers say, allow players to skip early content and get right to the parts that they want to play. But that defense doesn't hold water here. The high prices and low rewards of Asphalt 7's in-app purchase system seem to be set up to take advantage of children with access to their parents' passwords and people who have compulsive spending problems. I don't have a game developer's bible on hand to thump, but this feels wrong.

I may sound down on Asphalt 7, but there are really only two gripes that I have with its actual gameplay. Many of the early races fail to offer competitive AI opponents, and I found myself racing alone, far ahead of the rest of the pack. Racing without opponents is kept slightly exciting thanks to the prevalence of little boost and cash pickups scattered all over the maps, but a racing game isn't as fun when all the action is taking place 200 yards behind you.

The game's other problem crops up whenever you try to take down opponents by ramming into them Burnout style. Something about the collision physics is off in a big way, and slamming into a rival's car barely does anything to it at all. I found that I had to really grind cars into a wall or just hit them while using a fully charged-up boost if I wanted any chance of taking them out. It reminded me that I was playing a cheap mobile game.

To Asphalt's credit, nothing else feels cheap. The interface, graphics and music make me wonder if Gameloft is making a mistake by pricing the game at only 99 cents. It's got tons of content (20+ hours in the career mode alone), flawless online multiplayer and polish that would be impressive for an Xbox Live Arcade game. On top of all that, the default control scheme works perfectly; I'd say it's the best of its kind on iOS.

No other arcade racer on the App Store comes close to matching Asphalt 7's presentation quality, but it suffers from a lack of identity. Nearly everyone who plays this will say out loud to their friends: "Whoa, this is just like a console racing game!" But some of those same people will find themselves wishing for something that they haven't already seen somewhere else.

Gameloft's complete incapacity for gameplay innovation and penchant for annoying players into spamming their own Facebook accounts drags Asphalt 7 down, but I'd be lying if I said it's not the best arcade racer available for iPhone and iPad.

WIRED Stellar production values, great controls, oodles of fun content.

TIRED Obnoxious social media integration, irresponsible IAP implementation, creatively uninteresting.

Rating:

99 cents, Gameloft

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