Asphalt 9 is a good game spoiled by many issues. This is what happens if you put some greedy businessmen (Vivendi / Gameloft management) in charge of a racing game by talented developers. Simply put, A9 is a racing (Need For Speed mixed with Burnout/some elements from Trackmania) / destruction derby / casino game with progress based on playing the same few tracks thousands of times for Asphalt 9 is a good game spoiled by many issues. This is what happens if you put some greedy businessmen (Vivendi / Gameloft management) in charge of a racing game by talented developers. Simply put, A9 is a racing (Need For Speed mixed with Burnout/some elements from Trackmania) / destruction derby / casino game with progress based on playing the same few tracks thousands of times for underwhelming rewards which are mostly generated "randomly" (it's actually a rigged system). The economy of this game is based on blue tokens (premium currency; hard to earn and you can buy it with real money), red tokens (cheap currency that you get instead of extra blueprints after maxing out a car and it's used only in their store), credits (for upgrading the cars), SC (during some special events).



The progress in this game is pretty fast in the beginning and after a while it turns into endless boring grind. If you're not prepared to play every day for many months or years just to get a semi-decent garage and if you have a low tolerance to frustration then stay away from this game.



The biggest issues are:

- the fuel system (imagine waiting 6 hours for some top tier cars to refill in order to play mere 3 races);



- the ticket system (play a few races in events and wait over one hour to play again or watch ads; this is an evil strategy to make people open the game many times during a day);



- the cards system (almost everything in this game is based on rigged luck aka loot boxes: you usually don't get what you need);



- underwhelming rewards in events and multiplayer (they keep nerfing the rewards);



- many cheaters flooding the leaderboards (esp. on Android);



- unfair multiplayer (their matchmaking system has nothing to do with fair play; their system often pairs overpowered beasts with mediocre or bad cars and as you can guess, the good cars usually win);



- unbalanced garage (in every car class the difference between the first car and the last one is huge) and also most cars are bad or underwhelming (the good ones are extremely expensive);



- terrible exchange rates (e.g. they sell epic parts starting from 6000 red tokens each but your epic parts worth no more than 100 red tokens if you sell them);



- extremely overpriced packs (whoever made those prices is either an arrogant millionaire or completely deluded; you can buy some real used cars with how much they ask to get some cars);



- the terrible AI cars: they are programmed to ruin your race by pushing you on the walls and generally slowing you down (costing you wasted tickets and fuel cells - see how evil GL are?), are unrealistically fast (they can catch up like they're driving with over 600 kmh even if their stats are far worse) and use the so called rubberbanding (the worst AI for racing games);



- pay 2 win special events with many "rank required" pay walls;



- many glitches/bugs in the physics engine which will ruin many of your races (pro tip: use brake if the car starts rolling uncontrollably while in air);



- it lacks basic features such as restart race, quit game, replay seekbar, manual acceleration;



- the knockdown system is unreliable and doesn't work as expected every time;



- unrealistically high reputation required to earn all club milestones which put pressure on players to play many, many hours and that leads to most top clubs to use bot farming;



- annoying slow animations everywhere plus those pesky Claim buttons (they didn't even bother to add Claim All buttons; they expect players to do a lot of useless work);



- slow Customer Care (they are polite but they take ages to solve issues).



Fighting against these issues is like extra game challenges besides the actual races and garage management. Vivendi/Gameloft afford to keep those issues unfixed because they bet on the existing players to keep playing to not give up on their hard work (their garage). I'm not sure this strategy will work in the long run. Vivendi/Gameloft are disrespected by their player base because they seem to care only about making easy money.



But there are some positive parts too: many races are very entertaining especially if you're skilled and play in manual mode against other skilled players, the control of the cars is pretty good (much better than A8), it's nice to build a garage, the cars look very good (those designers did an excellent job), the tracks are colorful and interesting (still, they are also very twisty), the career mode is decent, they put some effort to make some special events look interesting, their community (Reddit, Youtube, Discord, Facebook, official board) is dedicated. Also the UI designers deserve some praise. There are many UI elements which are looking nice: the fonts, the badges, many game menus, those beautiful track logos at the beginning of the races, the color scheme, the garage (the original one, not the current one), etc. … Expand