Gran Turismo 7 Review

From the first honk of the series’ iconic countdown klaxon, there are moments during Gran Turismo 7 when it feels almost like a remake of the 1997 original. In the space of a moment I’m 16 again and stuffing earthshaking turbos into a bright red Mitsubishi GTO, wondering how I’m going to be able to beat my dad around Trial Mountain when he always gets the DualShock and I have to make do with our only other controller – a terrible, translucent blue aftermarket job with no analogue sticks. That’s a kind of magic a video game series can’t buy; it can only earn. Gran Turismo 7 has that magic; that compulsive car upgrade loop the series established, plus the hot looks and sterling handling to back it up. But there’s a lot more to Gran Turismo 7 than the sum of its nostalgia – even if there are still a few traditions it should’ve left in its rear-view mirror.

Nostalgia isn’t a requirement, though: Gran Turismo 7 is the most welcoming GT ever, with dozens of hours of curated races and tasks designed to induct a new generation of players into the classic GT experience. GT7 achieves this via the Gran Turismo Café, an eccentric but effective little hub that the developers at Polyphony have placed right in the middle of its world map. When we drop in, the café owner assigns us specific races and tasks via a series of 39 so-called “menu books.” Working through those gradually introduces new drivers to how things work in GT – from earning licences and finding and buying cars, to customisation and racing. Some of it may initially seem like busywork to long-time GT players, but the racing events the Gran Turismo Café deliberately threads us through all make up part of the large list of career races we’d be otherwise doing anyhow – and the decent collection of reward cars offered for working through the menu books makes it well worth your time.

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You’ll definitely be able to win many more cars this way than you’d be able to afford to buy in your first week with GT7, that much is clear. Payouts aren’t particularly extravagant and car upgrade costs can be surprisingly high for some items, like tyres that cost twice as much as an entire MX-5, or $100,000 nitrous systems no amount of boosted DVD players would ever pay for. Even neat ideas, like the huge range of official manufacturer paint colours we can use in the design booth, annoyingly come with a cost attached.

Nevertheless, collecting each themed trio of cars for the GT Café’s menu books (like European classic compacts, or retro Japanese sports icons) also unlocks a sweetly earnest short video that showcases the cars and explains their relevance to automotive culture. These vignettes are clearly aimed at people with a more limited background in motoring history than I have but I still admire Polyphony’s efforts to try and add context to why certain cars are here. That said, while some of these collections are very historically robust and can properly chart the lineage of certain iconic models, some others are hamstrung by GT7’s limited pool of cars to pull from. For instance, GT7’s Supra and GT-R collections are great examples of menu books that span decades of motoring evolution, but others have to take a bit more of a grab-bag approach. GT7’s car roster exceeding 400 sounds good on paper (and it surpasses the nearly 350 that 2017’s GT Sport ended up with after several years of updates) but accounting for multiple variations of the fantasy Vision GT cars, the race car versions of road cars, and then the reverse “road car” versions of some of those race cars, that 400 figure shrinks a bit. It’s really only around half the cars available in Forza Motorsport 7, the crosstown rival racer it originally inspired.

The reality is the garage in GT7 is not nearly as rich as you may expect – and certainly not as current. With a few exceptions, most manufacturers’ ranges tend to top out at around 2017. If you’re expecting to see quite a few high-profile cars from the last two or three years here, like the latest McLarens or any Tesla built since 2012, you may be disappointed.

Handle with Flair

Crucially, however, the car handling is quite impeccable – and virtually every single car I’ve driven feels appreciably different from the last. Retro road cars feel lairy and loose, and they can become wilder still with some extra oomph squeezed under the bonnet as proper performance tuning returns to the series after its absence from GT Sport. Modern sports cars feel a bit more planted but they’re nothing like the dedicated race models, which are stiff and cling to the tarmac like their tyres have talons. In what feels like an improvement on GT Sport, grip doesn’t quite disappear off a cliff the moment I overcook a corner exit. I’ve found I’m able to drive out of trouble more often after perching a car in a slide. I have my reservations about the off-road handling – specifically how it deals with jumps – but GT7 is amazing on asphalt.

Like GT Sport before it GT7 seriously sings on a steering wheel (I’m using the Thrustmaster T-GT) but know that it still feels absolutely at home on a DualSense controller, and I haven’t felt like it’s a disadvantage; in fact, I’ve achieved gold cups in the bulk of the license tests using a controller. I have found the weaker of the two countersteering assists useful in some vehicles because it takes some of the dramatic edge off my car’s bulk snapping from side to side – something that can be a little tricky to intuit with only the tiny amount of travel possible on an analogue stick compared to a wheel – but if you require more assists GT7 features plenty of them, all the way up to full auto-braking. GT7 may be a serious racer, but it’s not an entirely inaccessible one.

The PS5 DualSense’s haptic feedback also rates a positive mention. There are times where it feels like it’s trying to deliver a few too many sensations simultaneously to really grasp what each is trying to illustrate – so it’s just a lot of whirring and buzzing, all at once – but the DualSense otherwise copes with GT7 splendidly. The response to curbs is particularly nuanced, and there are some other bits of feedback that are unique to particular tracks that feels very cool – like the whirr from whipping over the metal grates that stretch across the Tokyo expressway circuit. That this buzz feels distinct in my hands from the clunk of a gear change is exactly the type of thing I’m keen to keep seeing done with the DualSense.

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However, it remains a shame that Polyphony keeps compromising its high-quality driving by persisting with frustrating rolling starts for career mode events, repeating the same mistake GT6 made. In a real-life motor race, cars cruise closely in two rows for rolling starts. But in GT7 career races, the cars are arranged in single file, 50-odd metres apart, and we are always placed in last. In a race with 20 opponents at Mount Panorama, this means the leader is already all the way up Mountain Straight and approaching the Cutting by the time we cross the starting line. In simple terms, that’s well over a kilometre away. These ridiculous head starts mean career events are less a race than they are a chase. We’re not dogfighting for track position with backmarkers; we’re simply blazing past them trying to negate the immense starting deficit. The racing really just amounts to an overtaking challenge, which GT7 already officially has a bunch of in its addictive set of driving mission challenges. What’s mystifying is that GT7 has a great and extremely granular custom race creator that features grid starts so we know there’s no technical reason not to have them. It just… doesn’t use them where they’d work best.

Tracing Game

Starting out in GT7 on PS5 you’ll be offered the choice between two graphics modes: a performance mode that prioritises the frame rate at all times, and a ray tracing mode that applies ray tracing to certain non-gameplay scenarios (you can switch between them at any time). Ray tracing can be active in things like the photo mode, replays, and the garage, but I honestly don’t feel the juice is worth the squeeze. With ray tracing on the camera tends to jitter a bit when panning across interiors, and I actually think the cars tend to look sharper and better without it.

In fact, GT7’s greatest lighting victory has little to do with its ray tracing mode at all: its fantastic time-of-day effects bathe the fabulous set of circuits in supremely realistic and always-changing light. Watching as the crisp afternoon sun gave way to the pink and purple hues of dusk atop Mount Panorama I was seriously impressed; it’s distractingly good. GT7’s dynamic time-of-day and weather effects aren’t a genre first but they have finally pushed its tracks to the next level – and they’re doubly cool when applied to returning original GT circuits like High Speed Ring, Deep Forest, and fan favourite Trial Mountain.

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It’s just a great-looking package all around, really. I quite like the smaller details, from the way the pit crews clamber up fences to pump their fists and wave flags on the last lap in championship races to the way tow hooks, decals, and unique aero parts begin to naturally appear on tuned AI opponents as you move up through the competition ranks. Those aero parts are the result of a neat wing editor that allows us to select from different end plates and wing heights rather than make do with a small handful of presets, and they’re just one of a bunch of innovations hidden in GT7’s cosmetic and performance customisation. I’m a real fan of the straightforward detuning that’s now possible in the settings screen; it’s now much easier to keep your most-loved cars on track when performance limits fluctuate between events by simply adding ballast or turning down the engine computer (rather than heading back to the garage to strip off parts to make something race legal).

Everything Must Go

While the Gran Turismo Café is a clever experiment that works, GT7’s new music features – which were a large focus of February’s extensive GT7 reveal – feel like a bust. They’re both let down by an ostensibly large music library that ranges from mostly forgettable to outright weird.

The Music Replay feature works as advertised – and I understand that the race replay cameras are being generated around the track dynamically depending on how fast my car is travelling and switching in time with the music – but the effect isn’t particularly seismic or stirring. Music Rally, an arcade-style mode where we start with a certain number of beats which tick down as a song plays and need to be topped up by passing through extension gates, has turned out to be a particularly odd focus. “Quirky” is the polite way to describe it, but “baffling” is probably the more accurate. It’s admittedly hard for me to gauge how a 2022 audience will respond to hustling around a track to classical disco megamixes from 1982, but personally I’m confused as hell here.

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Most disappointingly, for a series with a baked-in history of associated music tracks that are seared into the minds of millions, this wasn’t the direction Polyphony went with Music Rally. It gets frustratingly close, with one of the songs in Music Rally plucked from the opening movie to the PAL version of GT5 Prologue on PS3, but that’s it. A Music Rally mode stacked with songs from the heyday of Gran Turismo, like My Favourite Game by The Cardigans, The Chemical Brothers remix of Everything Must Go, or any of the Ash, Feeder, and Lenny Kravitz tunes that made up those early intro movies and soundtracks? That would have been a very clever hook. As it stands, though, the six currently available Music Rally events are mostly a bit bizarre and boring.

Even more confusingly, it’s one of only two modes that function offline. Like GT Sport before it, everything else in the single-player mode (except an arcade mode with a tiny selection of cars) requires an online connection. That you can’t access online multiplayer in this case is obviously a given, but the fact you can’t even access the two-player mode offline has me stumped. That needless connectivity isn’t as big a problem for most people in 2022 as it was a few years back but it’s still something to be aware of.

While the PvP online component was really the crux of GT Sport, GT7 doesn’t emphasise it in quite the same way, letting the single-player campaign flex its muscles. With rotating, scheduled racing and championships, Sport mode in GT7 still functions the same as it does in GT Sport, though, so I fully expect it’ll be a similarly strong online racing venue. GT7 also adds some more low-stakes multiplayer options, including lobbies where players can meet up on most of the circuits, tool around with no specific race settings, and just chat, compare cars, and cruise. These may descend into bedlam following GT7’s launch, but I think the idea is sound.

Verdict

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Gran Turismo 7 Review

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