Asphalt Jungle 2

Back in September, I ended up with the biggest backlog of developer challenges I had ever had, at least to that point.  I’m actually a little embarrassed to admit that one fell through the cracks and never got reviewed.  That game, Asphalt Jungle 2, has since long slipped off the new release list and into obscurity.  What can I say?  My bad doesn’t seem to cover it, especially when XBLIG developers count on any tiny scrap of coverage they can get to generate sales.  For what it’s worth, I’m genuinely apologetic.

The sad thing is, despite looking like the most boring thing since a slide show on coffee tables, Asphalt Jungle 2 is pretty damn fun.  It took me a while to realize that.  At first glance, it looks like yet another take on Pipe Dream.  Here, you have to keep a car moving by rotating various pieces of road on a 6×10 grid.  Once the car drives over a piece, the piece disappears.  The car can travel through one side of the screen and out the other provided the roads are pointed in the right direction.  And finally, after a set interval of time, the screen refills with more blocks to rotate.

Christ, it even sounds boring when I describe it.  And the screen shot above looks boring.  Now I know what gaming journalists went through trying to explain the appeal of Tetris twenty years ago.  Asphalt Jungle 2 is fun.  It’s a time sink, that’s what it is!  I told Brian I would play it for an hour and be done with it.  Three hours, eleven minutes, nine seconds later (it keeps track), I finally emerge from my session, totally satisfied.  Sure, my body forgot to blink over the course of that time and thus my eyeballs felt like someone had scrubbed them out with an SOS pad, but it was worth it.

Asphalt Jungle 2 is not perfect.  The controls are too loose and its lack of online leaderboards killed any chance it had of making the top 10 list.  It’s also butt-ugly, sounds like shit, and is about as shallow as a puddle of spit.  Regardless of all of that, it’s a genuinely good video game.  Isn’t that what we’re all here for?  So give it a whirl and watch the hours disappear without explanation.  It happened to me.  Then again, my ass has been sore lately.  Maybe it was actually an alien abduction.

Asphalt Jungle 2 was developed by Hoelkosoft

80 Microsoft Points added a list of pending developer challenges to the sidebar here so that the Chick can’t pull an oopsie like this again in the making of this review.