Asphalt 6: Adrenaline For Mac OS X Review

Written by John Thompson on March 3, 2011 · Filed under Games, Review 

If there’s one good thing about the Mac OS X App Store, it’s the temptation that it offers to developers to port their existing iPhone and iPad applications over to Mac OS X. In the case of games, this is fantastic for Mac users who have typically had less choice than Windows users when it comes to titles on the operating system.

With the release of Asphalt 6 for Mac, it seems as though Gameloft is looking to expand to the Mac App Store with the driving game as one of its first titles on the desktop alongside Let’s Golf! 2. Gameloft has developed many of my favourite iPad games, such as Asphalt 5 HD, Real Tennis HD and Let’s Golf! HD, so I was looking forward to checking out what the development company had to offer on the desktop operating system.

The main menu of the game gives you various options. You can choose to continue your racing career, in which you race for prize money and upgrade to faster cars for future races or choose to free race, where you simply race against other cars outside of your career.

The gameplay itself is incredibly smooth, and graphics on my unibody MacBook with an NVIDIA 9400M graphics chip looked great. CPU usage hardly spiked when playing the game at all, and then fan seldom made itself known, so the game doesn’t demand powerful graphics cards. No minimum specifications are even outlined on the App Store entry for the game, so any machine capable of running Snow Leopard should be able to run the game no problem.

The controls for the game couldn’t be simpler, with the arrow keys and space bar providing the only necessary controls throughout. The forward key accelerates, the right and left keys steer your car and the back arrow brakes for you. If you want to use the turbo boost (and you will want to use the turbo boost), then you can activate this by using the space bar.

Each event in your career may have different objectives. Many of the events will be a straight race, where you have to finish in the top X number of cars to complete the event. Other events may be a knock out, where you cannot be in last position as each lap finishes, or you may need to eliminate other racers from the event to complete it.

The game is certainly a lot of fun, and one of the only great racing games on Mac OS X as a platform. It did, however, look a little enlarged when viewed on a larger display at a higher resolution compared to the sharpness of the graphics when viewing it on the MacBook Pro. Also, the arrow keys can sometimes feel a little bit restricting, especially when compared to the fluid steering of the iPad on the same title.

For the price though, you can’t really complain. At £3.99, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline is an absolute bargain compared to most other games on the Mac. If you like racing games at all, then you should definitely check this title out.

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