I was looking forward to the release of Asphalt 8 so when I woke up yesterday morning, I checked the app store immediately to see if it was there; sure enough it was! I downloaded it and played it all throughout the day. Overall, it is a great improvement over Asphalt 7, but I am still just not fond of the menu system. I actually kind of prefer the simplicity of the menus from A7.
Graphically, a good amount of improvement and the nice thing is you can adjust the graphical settings. I like that games have been providing this option. As far as the graphics compared to Real Racing 3, I think they are on equal grounds. RR3 is a more realistic-looking game with overall bland racing environments and some really bad aliasing, but A8 uses real cars in a more arcade, vivid environment and it doesn't have nearly as bad of aliasing. One aspect that I am not quite as pleased on is the framerate. It's just not as fluid as Asphalt 7 on the N7 FHD. Of course, this is likely due to the increase in graphical improvements made and that I am playing on the high graphics setting, but that's partially why we got this game right? I think they'll further optimize the game so this will be less of an issue. I have run this both on my HTC One and my N7 FHD and it runs better on the N7.
Still, I am have a blast playing it and, despite the couple of quibbles I mentioned, the game is better the its predecessor.