Because "Okay Turismo" doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Rejoice, rev-heads, for we have been catered to. Gran Turismo 7 has arrived and broken the long drought of proper racing simulation titles for our console loving brethren. Following the online-focussed GT Sport, this proper numbered sequel sets its sights on being a much more intimate affair; a place for car lovers to dig into and enjoy both online and off.
It’s been almost ten years since we were last graced by a main-series Gran Turismo title, and in that time simulation-based racing has come a long way. Graphics are better than ever, tyre models are the most accurate they’ve ever been, and the simulation market itself is ripe with quality titles. Even games like the F1 series are managing to be competent simulators these days. With that in mind, where does Gran Turismo 7 fall amongst all them?
If you’re new to the series then the best way I can describe it to you is this: Pokémon for car people. Racing has always been a big part of the attraction to the series, sure, but more than that the GT games have offered a chance to jump into a wide variety of cars you’d never be able to afford in real life. While Gran Turismo 6 had a whopping 1247 cars by the end of its life, Gran Turismo 7 launches with 420. This is a tad disappointing, but with all of the tweaking and tuning on offer in GT7 I’m not entirely surprised.
When you first jump into GT7 you’re greeted with the optimistically named World Map. This map is your main menu, and you’ll be seeing a lot of it as you’re sliding between races, car shops and the various other activities in its little world. As pretty as this map is, I soon got sick of just how much time you have to spend looking at it between venues.
You see, the menuing system in this latest instalment of the series is, to be quite frank, terrible. You’ll be bouncing around its screens a lot as you switch cars, tune them up and jump around missions, and they’re just no good. The animations in particular are a sore point for me, as I would often find myself staring at the World Map when surfing through menus editing my car. Why? Well it’s simple – the ability to interact with the menu loads before the menu itself, and it’s very easy to be sent screaming back to the main map with a stray press of a button on a blank screen.
While Gran Turismo 7 doesn’t have a story in a traditional sense, it does offer a string of missions to show you the ropes. These take the form of Menu Books at the in-game Café and task you with earning three thematically similar cars through races. These range from pokey little European hot hatches through to the purebred fury of the BMW M3, and upon completion give you a little snippet of the car’s history.
Early on this will be your primary way of gaining access to new vehicles, and every now and then you’ll be thrown a menu that introduces you to a different aspect of 7’s world. This may be the Licence Testing centre, where you need to complete challenges to earn access to harder content, themed Missions, or even essential gameplay areas like car tuning or multiplayer.
Progressing through these menus is vital to unlock everything GT7 has to offer, but by god is it boring. I love cars — and I love racing them too — but the slow and drawn-out pacing of these menu books (that withhold some essential gameplay features, mind you) is such a drain. If racing games are about adrenaline and edge of your seat moments, then the menus are like golf… and not the Volkswagen kind.
This attitude that Gran Turismo 7 has towards cars feels weirdly out of place with my personal experience as a car fan. It carries a snooty reverence that feels more at home in a British country club than at a racetrack. For me, cars are about the down and dirty. Whether that’s the thrill of wheel-to-wheel racing or the enjoyment of nailing the perfect lap, cars and racing are a visceral, tangible experience.
In Gran Turismo though, the whole thing feels more like you’re in a museum, looking at cool cars rather than getting to try them out. Sure, I can jump in a BMW E46 M3 and tear it up, but it’s all of this between stuff that feels super disjointed and out of touch. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening movie when you first boot up the game. The very first thing you’re greeted with — after adjusting some settings — is what YouTube tells me is an eight-minute video. This video is some Hideo Kojima levels of self-gratification, with this enormous cutscene deflating my enthusiasm entirely across its titanic time span. While I personally didn’t enjoy Forza Horizon 5 at all – it’s far too arcade-like for my tastes – it at least got its intro right.
That being said, Gran Turismo 7 absolutely slays Forza Horizon 5 – and by extension any other Forza titles released in the last 5 years – when it comes to the racing. As well it should too, given its claim to be a racing simulator versus the blatantly arcade Horizon series.
When you’re on track, all of those weird Menu Books and the abhorrent menuing system just fades away. You’re left with just a few simple constants. Your car’s speed. Your opponent’s ability. The ever-diminishing level of grip at hand. And, of course, your own skill.
The handling model in GT7 is pretty good for the most part, and can be seen as a somewhat realistic simulation of real-world physics. It’s not the best simulation, but it does enough to establish itself as a contender. Cars are slippy in the wet, and grippy in the dry. Tyre choice matters and can be the difference between sticking to a quick line or running off the track.
All of this is balanced and offset by both your own skill and by the assists you choose to use when racing. I’m normally pretty gung ho about turning these off for the best experience, but oh boy is GT7 not the place for that. Out of the gate I chose the Expert preset to test the waters, and found pretty quickly that this was nearly undriveable – though not for the reason you think.
Most often, you’ll find yourself spinning out if you jab on the throttle or locking up if you hit the brakes too hard when assists are dialled down. This is somewhat true in GT7 too and the assists offered obviously serve to counter that – turning on stability control will prevent most spins, while traction control will handle most of the rest. ABS prevents you from locking up and skidding off during late braking manoeuvres and steering and braking assist options are there for those who choose to use them.
The ABS setting is a bit of a weird one as it feels like a necessity on many cars. Too often I found myself locking up going into corners with it off, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why this was happening. Usually I’m a bit of a maestro at braking late and then using trail braking to thread a corner, but in GT7 I struggled to even brake in reasonable positions with this turned off – and this was with good brakes equipped too. Anything past 50% brake pressure in those scenarios would cook my goose, and so I had to resign myself to using ABS all of the time.
There is one particular assist though that feels entirely designed to murder you, and that is counter steer. This setting comes in three flavours; Strong (No), Weak (Still no) and Off (Yes). If you intend to play Gran Turismo 7 then please — please, I beg of you — turn this option off. Playing with this option on any setting often lead to my car being speared into the wall mid corner or on corner exit, as the game tried to counter your correctional inputs. So often I lost control in the lead of a race because the game wrenched on some counter steer to counter the slight counter steer that I was intentionally inducing to hold a good line. If you have any semblance of driving ability in games, please turn it off.
Finally, the major elephant in the room that needs to be address is the decided lack of “Gran” in Gran Turismo 7. This game isn’t a particularly grand tour at all, actually, and offers only a handful of real tracks smattered between many of their own ones. On top of that, there’s not that much to do really – no great variation in race modes or interesting new ideas brought to the table. There’s just the dull Menu Books, the challenging Missions and Licence Tests, and then multiplayer races.
Gran Turismo 7 feels like a car game for people who love to collect little matchbox cars, pop them into a cabinet in their box, and then look at them – never playing with them. Or perhaps it’s a racing game for the British gentry to enjoy as they sip their tea and admire the vast collection of cars they have, but never drive.
When you’re in it and smashing around the track against expert AI or other players, this is where Gran Turismo 7 excels. All of the weirdness that Polyphony Digital has bolted on to this quality car game fades away into obscurity. But sadly, that’s not all this is. Instead, it’s a jumble of well-made car racing and strange design decisions, coupled with this tonally odd take on what it means to be a car nerd. For now though, Gran Turismo 7 is the best console racing game for the masses, at least until another contender comes along.
Gran Turismo 7 was reviewed using a retail code on PS5, as purchased by Stevivor. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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Gran Turismo 74 March 2022PS4 PS5 |
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