Gran Turismo has been the gold standard for the racing simulation genre for over 25 years. The franchise has continually served as a showcase for PlayStation’s latest hardware, both visually and technically. Gran Turismo 7 is no different in this regard; Racing has never felt more precise, nor have the vehicles looked more lifelike. In the time since that first entry, however, the field has caught up with Gran Turismo. This newcomer is still an excellent driving sim, but no longer laps the competition.
Gran Turismo 7 sets the tone early; This is the sim racing series at its most rampant. The several-minute non-skippable credit scroll chronicling the history of the automobile, followed by a lengthy in-game cutscene, demonstrates just how seriously car culture is taken. While other racing games have made deliberate efforts to remove as many barriers to the fun as possible, Gran Turismo 7 has no qualms about pacing the action at its own pace. While this delivery is sometimes too slow at the start, the sim racing doesn’t get much better once career mode opens and rubber hits the road.
Whether you’re driving a finely tuned supercar north of 200mph on a straight or navigating unsteadily through a twisting off-road course in a four-wheel drive vehicle, Gran Turismo 7 masterfully delivers one of the best driving experiences in gaming. Every inch of the traveled road carefully considers the conditions in which you drive. Elevation changes, weather, road surface, road grade, vehicle downforce and myriad other factors seamlessly contribute to whether you successfully carry your swing into a corner or break out onto the grass.
Even the smallest miscalculation can throw you off track. Since there’s no rewind function, as seen in many modern racing games, I love the tense sense of victory and defeat that’s delicately balanced at every turn. Unfortunately, if you want to use the assistance tools to better hold your own on the track, the drive-line tool, which shows you the best route for the track, is not only less informative than Gran Turismo’s contemporaries, but also it is also unreliable. On several occasions, I took the line’s advice and slammed into the barrier anyway, only to find that the brake indicator wasn’t showing up correctly on the track. Every time I got into one of these accidents, Gran Turismo 7’s lack of damage modeling brought me out of the experience; When a game is so focused on realistic graphics and controls, it’s jarring to emerge from a high-speed, low-damage wreck.
Polyphony Digital’s adoration for car culture remains evident as you progress through Gran Turismo 7’s unconventional career mode. Constantly returning to the in-game cafe, where you pull up quests like collecting specific vehicles or winning a Grand Prix, gives you an effective tour of the game’s many modes and offerings. Every time you complete a car collection mission, you’ll get a glimpse of the real-life story of the subject. I learned a lot about the history of the Ford Mustang in my early hours. Each time you get a new objective, Gran Turismo 7 will clearly tell you what you need to do to complete it. Even the side modes, like voiced time trials, mission-based challenges, and special license events, had me hitting the repeat button because I knew I could do a better time.
Progress happens at every turn, giving you an incentive to play “just one more race”. I lost track of time on more incidents than I can count when I discovered that the reward for the next race was a car I coveted. I loved the structure of the career mode around collecting vehicles, where every activity rewards you with money, cars and more. As your garage expands with more than 400 cars available at launch, your collection level will increase and unlock more missions and features. The cyclical ecosystem that Polyphony Digital utilizes in Gran Turismo 7 is satisfying, and since I placed more emphasis on building a garage than winning races, I rarely felt my progress falter, even when I couldn’t take the checkered flag home with me at every event. Still, I loved beefing up my favorite rides with the robust tuning features to give me the best chance of finishing first.
Unfortunately, the multiplayer suite often slows down the fun. Currently, you have the choice to participate in scheduled sporting events, where you register for a session and then wait for it to start, or join multiplayer lobbies. Sporting events are great fun – I particularly like Gran Turismo 7’s emphasis on driving well behaved and actively avoiding collisions – but it takes too long to get into the action. After registering for a sporting event, you sometimes have to wait more than 10 minutes before the race starts. Sure, you can do practice and qualifying laps while waiting for the race to start, but I wish these events only started after you entered a full session. Lobbies are a great way to bypass the wait while you set your own rules, but with home screens often populated by nearly empty groups, the barrier of jumping into a multiplayer session wasn’t worth the effort at times.
Despite its multiplayer shortcomings, Gran Turismo 7 is a great racing experience. I love the emphasis on the car collection and the respect given to automotive history and racing culture. Gran Turismo 7 features some of the best driving mechanics available and gives you several guides on how to engage with them. While it sometimes spends too much time off-track, each lengthy cutscene is clearly made with love, and that feeling shines through even more on the track.