Gran Turismo 7 (2022)

I am not much of a racing sim fan, and I always liked Forza Horizon better because it seems a better mix of arcade and simulation for me than GT7. The progression in the game, however, is fine for an inexperienced player like I am. The game does a very good job of easing you into its gameplay mechanics.

The videogame oozes love for the racings sports, but I was disappointed with the selection of cars. I wanted to find at least one of the multiple cars my family had, but I couldn't even find my 2022 Toyota in it.

I honestly really, really hated the rolling starts. They feel very unfair. Instead of a grid start, or at least a qualifier, you begin the race in the last place. Instead of a fair race it feels more like catching up to the dumb AI on the first place. And almost every single race from the campaign is like this for no particular reason. I've read a lot of people defending GT7 for this system because it avoids the often chaotic first rounds. While I do agree that it avoid that problem, for me it also avoided being fun and fair, leading to a frustrating experience.

Polyphony Digital also made a very scummy thing with the microtransactions in this game. At some point they weren't pleased with the number of microtransactions happening and decided to lower the ingame credits you make. I've seen people defend this, claiming that the campaign gives you free cars. Be that as it may, leaving aside the fact that once you finish the campaign progress slows down and you even have to pay credits for certain paints to customise your car, there really isn't a good reason gameplay wise for drastically reducing the amount of credits earned.

What saved the game for me was the VR mode. I don't care much for cars and actually avoid driving as much as I can in real life, but in VR simply admiring the cars was a memorable experience. I love to simply admire the car inside and outside.

An excellent game brought down by greed and deliberately bad choices.

I have loved Gran Turismo since the PS1 days and I think this is another great entry in the series. Gran Turismo has always been more than just a racing game. It is car porn. Gran Turismo 7 continues this tradition. The cars look stunning and are highly detailed inside and out. There is a great line up of diverse cars ready to collect, modify, customise, tune, race, learn about and love. There is an in depth photo mode with its own community to share, like and discuss photos and the same for livery designs too. There is so much here to learn about cars and the history of car makers and it also teaches the broader historical context as well. It is a dream for anyone that likes cars and is easy to get into whether you’re a veteran or newcomer.

Presentation wise Gran Turismo 7 is outstanding. As I already said cars are super detailed and beautiful. Tracks look great and have plenty of detail too. I like the style and menus. Weather looks good, skies look good, and tire smoke looks good. The game runs well and loads quickly. Sound design is impressive and the music selection is cool. There isn’t much to complain about here. Being a cross gen game I don’t think they pushed everything as far as they could with the PS5, obviously car damage is an area that still needs work but overall though I’m really happy with presentation and performance.

Gameplay is fun. Cars feel great and they did well making use of the PS5 controller features. Car handling and physics are what you expect. I know when a car is on the limit of grip and when it’s gone beyond that limit. There is a good sense of speed, weight and momentum. I can feel the road and the unevenness of the surface. Weather and puddles of water are done well and greatly impact driving. Tuning is rewarding. The game as a whole is mostly very rewarding, challenging and fun. I enjoyed slowly getting better and improving my times, making my way through the challenges, earning licenses, learning in the circuit experiences and testing myself against others online. There is lots of content here and they have been continuing to add to it. There are some weaknesses like the main campaign, café mode, being underdeveloped and underwhelming and I didn’t get music rally at all.

Now unfortunately I need to discuss this games big issues and a lot of people will already know what’s coming. Why the hell do I always need to be online for single player? I guess my disc will be useless in the future when it’s all taken down and I’m just screwed anytime I don’t have internet or there is maintenance. Then there is the fact that this game becomes a horrible grind to get and upgrade the more expensive cars. Things start off okay with regular currency and car rewards but once you get further along and everything gets more expensive it just ruins the game. I put around 80 hours in and I would still be playing if not for this bulls**t. Cars are too expensive and rewards are too low so your progress grinds to a halt. This was done on purpose to push people into spending real money on the very over priced in game currency and Gran Turismo 7 is a full priced Sony game too. Why would you do this to your own creation? Imagine making something excellent and then deliberately ruining it. Why would you do this to your brand? Is it really worth it? If you need to make more money off Gran Turismo 7 then find another way, I would rather pay a little extra up front then put up with this crap. To the people that made these decisions and to every person that buys this games currency, get away from videogames you are ruining it for the rest of us.

Gran Turismo 7 is really enjoyable and well made even with the horrible issues I still got plenty of time out of it. I just wish I could still be playing it and continuing to build my car collection. I would have rated it way higher if not for this and it could have been one of the absolute best PS5 games. I recommend getting Gran Turismo 7 if you’re into cars just don’t buy those expensive micro transactions and know that at some point it will become an awful grind.

7.8/10

The game itself is really great, with beautiful graphics and cars feel great to drive. The campaign is pretty good too and I have really enjoyed doing all the driving license challenges at Gold rating. The competitive multiplayer is a lot of fun too. That's the good part now about the bad.

Monetization

In order to encourage people to spend real money on credits they have a number of annoying systems in the game.

• many Legendary cars cost a huge amount of credits and they rotate in and out of the dealership, you need to wait weeks/months for a specific car to reappear if you have missed it
• there is a limited amount of single-player races that you can efficiently use to farm credits. It gets repetitive.
• multiplayer, despite the challenging aspect of it, gives very few credits, this annoys me a lot.

Despite this annoying monetization issues, the rest of the game stands strong enough for me to give 4/5 stars, if it wasn't for that then it would be an easy 5 stars.

Finished the campaign today, and all i can say is, what a great great game! This is, by a long shot, the best Gran Turismo they've made so far; everything from the older gran turismo is in it, driving licenses, missions, etc and then they added an absolute bunch of new stuff on top of it.

The game looks gorgeous, the polish is on another level and everything in it just seems flawless; the music, the car details, the fantastic backstories on the cars and tracks and the campaign that takes you through a fabulous history lesson on cars and circuits.

I've never understood the critisism on the microtransactions either, they are not needed at all. I finished the campaign with 82 cars in my garage and i still have 4 million credits sitting there, even after buying a 1 million dollar car for an achievement. Sure, the legends dealer has expensive cars and if you want those you're gonna have to grind races for a while. But that's the point right? They are legendary cars and if you want them, you do some playing the game for them. The option to buy is only there for really lazy whales who for some reason want to skip playing the game alltogether. 20 euros for 2 million creds, something that you can earn in less than an hour of actually playing the game ;) Maybe even less than 30 mins if you optimize it.

While i'm mostly done with the single player part (still some achievements to get), this will be my goto side game for a long time yet, as one of the online modes ('sport') seems quite ok-ish with the double rating they have: one for driver skill and one for behaviour, e.g. the idea is if you bump into people or drive off the track a lot your 2nd rating drops and you can't join certain tournaments till you improve it by playing nice for a while.

Note: Point of view ramble from someone that casually enjoys playing the entire racing genre. However I'm more pulled to arcade racers i.e. Forza Horizon and Grid, I don't really play racing sims, and I haven't played much of past GT games.

Man, I just can't get myself to finish this game... And to think this was the first GT game I actually owned. I was originally brought in from the release hype to the point I bought a PS4 mainly because of this game (and Everybody's Golf which ended up being a 5/5 one of my all-time favorite games ever), and heck even bought a Thrustmaster T150 wheel for this! This has been the very first game I've actually learned to drive in Manual rather than Auto shifting for once.

First impressions are incredibly strong. Not going to lie, I like the minimalist--but-classy look of GT. The menu is a nice casual introduction with fun history lessons to someone who's enjoyed playing racing games but never really... actually studied real life cars much. Also because...

.... I'm a huge fan of the series's original composed soundtrack track, especially the lounge music (many coming from GT5)! I mean I've already used them as working/studying music since a few years back. Not to mention the game's racing soundtrack contains the most beautiful version of Moon over the Castle thus far (Opening song from the Japanese GT games only until now!), 2022 remaster's of all of Daiki Kaisho songs from GT5, and all of the originally composed race music from Japanese GT4 only. That being said, I feel like old songs make up 2/3rds of my listening experience.

Now to the negatives...

This game has massive predatory microtransactions (when I put this up in March 23rd 2022) that the dev's support with credit grinding nerfs, high end cars costing $40 along with FMO time-limited invitations to even buy them, and even a PR statement along the lines of "sense of pride and accomplishment". Also, it's online-only even for single players, which is a problem when the game has been offline for more than a day. At this point, it's all covered if you look it up.

The big thing that makes the gameplay loop stale is just that the racing experience isn't good. The AI is terrible and unaggressive, so the devs made races be more like a Ridge Racer-styled "chase" where 1st place is like 30 seconds ahead of you and you have to catch up in like 2 laps. Not to mention the races are extremely long to me once you're 3/4 through the menu. Early races are 2 laps around short circuits, but late races are 5 lap slogs through 3 minute long laps! Race this long just bore me if the AI isn't providing any challenge or real sense of racing to me on Easy / Normal settings. However, you still need to get 3rd or higher to progress for me to want to risk wasting 20 minutes against Hard AI, especially without resets like what was seen in GRID / Forza.

I honestly had more of a fun time racing in GRID Legends (review), which I liked but didn't think it was amazing either. Even though it's much more arcadey and it has an over-time top track presentation with giant crowds and massive fireworks, the AI feels more human when it can both aggressively defend their place against you and slip when turning to the point of causing unrealistic but hilarious wipeouts.

In the end, I'm probably returning the wheel and trading in this game for whatever I can use the money towards whatever few games I buy in-store anymore, such as potentially Splatoon 3 or Pokémon Scarlet. While I also do feel the racing sim sub-genre isn't for me, I do feel the game has other fundemental issues that holds the game back from feeling current-gen.

5/5 game for presentation & music alone. 2/5 for game design decisions.