Ambitious and stylish, but not complete.

Asphalt : Urban GT goes all out, with loads of cars and tracks, many game modes, a full "evolution" mode and tuning and tweaking. Quite a lot for an early DS title. And the graphics are great as well! So is it a perfect racing-sim for DS? Not quite, but a nice try...

Asphalt : Urban GT lets you drive 25 real licensed cars which you can drive around 9 different tracks. The Arcade mode is the first stop on the menu, and offers Instant Play, which randomly picks a car/track/mode combination for you, Road Challenge, which is a series of five races played in a cup-like fashion, Free Race, where you can choose car and track to play, Time Trial, where you race against the clock and finally Cop Chase, where you play as the police, trying to catch other cars. Quite a lot to choose from. However, you will probably spend the most time in the Evolution Mode. The Evolution Mode is where you can complete various challenges to earn money, buy better cars, upgrade the cars you have and continue onward, trying to complete a whooping 35 championships! This mode is what makes the game fun. Tuning and tweaking works neat and some championships have certain requirements of car, etc. So you will have to adapt different strategies along the way. These championships mostly consist of standard races, but there are also races where where the racer at last position at each checkpoint loses, duels, with only you and one opponent racing head to head. Sometimes there are also events where you have to pass a camera at a certain speed. This is very hard to do though.

Control is different depending on car and tuning, but the overall feeling is that turning is way to slow. This is the largest problem with the game. Some turns feel almost impossible to take without either slowing down to a crawl or go crashing along the wall. However, playing is still fun and this instead adds to the challenge and is something you get to compensate for when driving. Players who easily gets frustrated because of this sort of thing should perhaps try the game before buying though. Because I feel this control is certainly not for everyone. Another interesting addition is that you can boost using the A button. Boost gives you lots of speed, but makes it very hard to control. You can gain additional boost by hitting objects on the tracks, taking corners nicely or by getting past opponents without touching them. This is a nice addition, because it rewards skilled playing. Better watch out for the on-comming traffic though. Hitting a car heading in you opposite direction will send you spinning. (Or sometimes make you stop completely, due to bad physics). There is another problem with the game as well, detracting from the fun; the standard angle (which is, behind the car and slightly above) is to low for some of the bigger cars. So it gets hard to see what is in front of you. This can be remedied by switching to internal view, but personally, I feel it's harder to play like that. Most cars does not have this problem though, its just a few larger ones.

Graphics are sharp and nice and has a realistic feel. As long as you race around the tracks as intended the visual style does impress, especially on the city levels. However, when getting of the track it does not look as good anymore. All ugly details which are otherwise skillfully hidden becomes clear then. But that is usually no problem. Cars are fine as well. A bit rough sometimes; it's obvious the DS can do so much more. A nice touch are the flashy camera angels you are presented to when jumping off ramps. It shows the jump from below and is quite impressive.
Music is very repetitive and sound is boring, so not much to say there though.

To wrap it up : I like Asphalt: Urban GT. But I can understand why some people don't. The controls take some learning (and a bit car tuning) to get used to and the game has some irritating faults. But beyond that it's still fun and with all content it will last really long.