18/03 Note - Still on the fence about this? Be aware that GT7's recent patch 1.07 has made the game unplayable while the servers go through extended maintenance - oh sorry you wanted to play single player? Nope. Forza Horizon, a game built around an online functionality from the ground up has an offline mode, GT7 - does not.
Secondly - they've cut the already meagre credit rewards by about 50% across a load of events. Since the option to buy in game credits is front and centre - there is really only one obvious conclusion. At £2.99 for 100,000 credits, some rare cars cost the equivalent of £160 of credits. For those of us with jobs or responsibilities that mean we only get an hour or two of gaming in a day (at best)...well there's only one way to get those rare cars, lets put it that way.
TLDR - If you are on the fence, think hard before deciding to support this business model, I'll leave the score as it is, but Polyphony Digital have sullied their reputation and cheapened the experience.
--- Original Review
You have a warning sign of what you are in for early on - when a lavishly beautiful intro video plays touching on the nostalgia of car ownership. I enjoyed in for about 4mins and then resolved to skip it and (y'know) get to the racing...nope, no skip option, you have to watch all 9mins of the car racing montage while a rock guitar grinds away, oh boy...
Gran Turismo 7 looks amazing, outrageously so - the cars glisten in the light, the tracks are drenched in detail and the force feedback through the controller is the best I've felt since Returnal (and yes, you can steer using motion sensors only if you want!)
Yet, it certainly has some strange choices, and I'm not just talking the inability to skip the intro movie. Walls of text with almost no voice acting, a soundtrack that's largely boring (I hope you like jazzed up classics), having to unlock tracks before racing them in custom...plus a requirement to always be online for the vast majority of features (split-screen racing why?). By far the bitterest pill is the invitation to 'top up your in game credits' with real money. Gran Turismo 7 is all about the grind, moving from Mini Cooper to fancy top end sports car - it will take you a long, long time to get there - so the constant nudge to 'spend real money' feels...iffy...£69.99 remember - and constantly making a play for your credit card, ugly.
Its a shame, as everything else about the game is beautiful, the driving - fantastic, the track options - fantastic - the weather and photo mode - breathtaking. The music rally is...er, well its novel I guess. A lot of the design choices are 'novel' - some work (the cafe set-up is kinda cute) and others, not so much.
I've played nearly 100hrs of the latest Forza Horizon game and have eagerly anticipated Gran Turismo on PS5 as a return to more simulation driving - a harder grind where you are not being showered by loot boxes and roulette spins every 2mins, in that, Gran Turismo succeeds. Its funny really, if Forza and Gran Turismo were brothers...(bear with me), Forza would be the younger, cooler brother, constantly jazzed up - snorting dubious substances while skydiving out of planes while taking snapshots on Instagram. Gran Turismo, older - slightly balding loafs around in a tweed jacket while rolling tobacco. He tries to be cool by showing off his vinyl collection to anyone that will listen, and will talk for hours about how the best James Bond was Timothy Dalton.
Sorry, I've lost my tangent slightly, lets wrap up:
The Good
- Fantastic graphics, outstanding force feedback and driving model
- Great variety of tracks, weather and time options (when you unlock them)
- Slow and steady grind encourages constant play and rewards
- No rewind option encourages careful driving and more immersion
- The steady drip feed of new tracks and options does maintain a certain level of addiction
- Wonderful photo mode if you like that sort of thing (once you've unlocked it)
- License mode is great if you are 'into' chasing gold medals etc - but when there can be 0.4secs separating silver from gold...the bloodhaze can easily descend...
The meh
- Game feels kinda easy, even on the hardest settings providing you keep your car upgraded
- It takes time before the game lets go of your hand - a lot of time
- Early 'championships' is usually just two races on the same circuit...forward and then reverse, lame
- No qualifying, rolling starts only from last place always, max ten cars for most 'cafe' races starting out, boring
- Constant online is an irritance - especially if your PS5 struggles to keep connection, I've had to hotspot from my phone just to play a single player race...
- Music rally is a shrug, but still fun now and again
- Music selection is...old fashioned and boring next to Forza - who picked these?
- Talking heads with stock photography and text only is an...interesting choice
- Absolutely no damage simulation is unsurprising for GT, but still disappointing in the 'real driving simulator'
- Wanna jump into Trial Mountain in a Bugatti when you boot up the game? Look forward to hours of unlocking :P
The bad
- The HUD takes up too much screenspace with pointless info (do we really need to know windspeed and direction) and has hardly no tweaking options. Future patch please.
- The constant nudges to spend real money is frankly insulting - seriously, its a £69.99 game, the grind is real, and it feels all too easy to say that this is to generate more microtransaction profits. I fully expect more cars to be added for 'free' down the line, requiring millions of in-game credits to buy - grind it out, or pay it out - what do you think they are hoping for here? (its money btw)
- You will be grinding a long time for some cars, I've seen costs of 11 million credits for a single historic 'used' car, so...when you take the above into account, its the long haul lets put it that way or £££
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Gran Turismo 7 arrived a couple of weeks ago, delivered on time on its release date. This is an updated review posted 30-Mar-22.Grinding. That's the word that everyone here seems to be using, and I know just what they mean. I saved up enough for a Ferrari 458 Italia, that was over a week ago, and I've been driving that same car around the same track (forwards and reverse) ever since. It's not so much winning that gives the buzz, but beating personal lap times. Which isn't terribly exciting. I haven't counted how many races I've competed in over the past 2/3 weeks but it must be at least 100 probably over 200. But it's the same thing over and over again. Can be soul destroying. I want to progress, I want to do better. I want more tracks and more cars. The time investment required to upgrade tracks and cars is so huge that it takes the element of fun and pleasure out of it. Somebody somewhere at Polyphony has got their sums wrong, in that they should deliver fast engagement and self-development for their GT fans. Instead, they've given us a game that challenges not your PB lap times, but your will to live.My last purchase of the game was GT5 12 years ago in 2010 for the PS3 (I never owned a PS4 console) so for me this was expected to be a significant jump forwards. To be honest: It isn't. I remember getting Gran Turismo for my PS3 and it was mind-blowing. Here we are more than a decade later and while it is admittedly an improvement, it's a much smaller advance than I had hoped.On the other hand, if you've never had a Gran Turismo game before, this game will not disappoint! Of course it's a near-essential game for the PS5 for anyone who likes high class racing games - it's the standard by which most if not all are judged. I love the game but as I only got it a couple of weeks back, I have a lot of driving to do and will update this post regularly (I already have, above).If you’re playing on a PS5, the DualSense wireless controller's already excellent haptic feedback is enhanced beautifully here. You’ll feel resistance in the triggers as you brake and change gears. All the bumps in the road surface, the screeching of tyres and even the friction of your car’s windscreen wipers are registered by the DualSense’s vibration, adding a greatly heightened sense of reality and immersion in each and every race.5 stars, if you've never had it before. 4 stars at most if you have. (shame about the price - annoying to see it discounted from the £70 I paid so quickly. Wish I'd delayed my decision now)Such high expectations. Such mixed feelings now that I've had it a while. I can't imagine not having it, in spite of the arse-aches, but Polyphony definitely messed things up here. Life's pretty tough for many of us these days, and a video game should be rewarding escapism. It should put a grin on your face. For me, it's more of a grimace, thinking about all the grinding I've yet to do.
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