This seems to be a deal breaker for some, but for me Gran Turismo has always been about sporting competition.
Rfactor 2 ps4 windows#
Cars can get scratched, but as in previous entries, you won’t be denting the bumper or smashing windows here. If you were to call out one thing missing from Gran Turismo 7’s gameplay (and people do), it would be the lack of a damage model. In longer races they also make (mostly) sensible and varied strategy decisions, keeping you on your toes as you make real-time calculations about fuel loads and tyre compounds. Occasionally they’ll even land in the gravel and bring out the yellow flags. Your opponents will make natural-looking mistakes, diving too deep into a turn under pressure or getting out of shape at the rear on the exit. The AI you race against keeps things interesting, too. The latter two are invaluable in the late game once you’re running longer races and need to start thinking about strategies, stints, and pit stops. Some of the most useful are settings for traction control and your fuel mix, as well as a zoomable weather radar that shows any rain due to pass over the circuit.
The HUD provides some fairly detailed options for a simcade racing game in switchable tabs in the bottom right-hand corner. Coming in straight from F1 2021, it took me a few races to work out what exactly the game wanted from me in terms of braking and turn-in, but when you get into a rhythm, getting it right feels amazing. Control is the name of the game, and the best moments occur when you’re right on the edge, just keeping it together enough to execute a clean pass on the outside of a turn. Gran Turismo 7 lacks the sense of speed of some racers, but this is more of a technical game - every corner must be carefully considered in terms of speed and angle.
I would describe the handling itself as weighty. Even little details, like water sitting for longer under bridges, have been accounted for. Transitions are natural, moving from bright sunshine to torrential rain with no sudden, jarring changes, and when things go in the other direction there is an immense satisfaction to keeping your car on the drying racing line with the jeopardy of puddles all around you, knowing even a small mistake could cost a lot of time. Wet racing is a joy, feeling slightly less grippy without turning tracks into ice rinks, as in some other games. Speaking of the rain, the weather system really deserves all the attention it has received. Rain and spray pattering on your windscreen sounds just right, and even the post-race reward screen is set to the metallic clicking of a car cooling down. Polyphony Digital has thought of everything, from the clunk as you run over a kerb to the rumble as you race across road markings on street circuits. You’d expect a big-budget racing game to have great-sounding engines, but Gran Turismo 7 really goes above and beyond when it comes to the small touches it would be easy to overlook. The circuits look great too, even if things are a little sparse trackside in some areas, with HD revamps of some of the beloved fictional Gran Turismo tracks a particular treat to race on. I wrote in my first impressions article about how the beauty of the vehicles often led to a conflict between my sim racer instinct to use the first-person view and a desire to use the chase camera to see more of the cars. Even on the PlayStation 4, the game is gorgeous. So although everything here is true at the time of publication, there is hope on the horizon! Driving fast, shiny carsīut let’s start where Gran Turismo 7 does deliver: out on the tarmac. Note: On the day this review was due to be published, Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi published a blog post announcing several upcoming updates that address many of the negative points in this article (although notably not the always online problem). So you’ve been warned – I’m going to be saying a lot of nice things about the racing, but make sure you read until the end. The truth is that there is a fantastic racing game here – possibly the best ever.īut in writing a review it is impossible to ignore that the game’s experience is soured by implementations of some of the dirtiest tactics the video game industry has been perfecting in recent years in order to extract every penny possible from players.
Writing a review for Gran Turismo 7 having observed what has happened to it in the three weeks since its release is a hugely difficult task.