From the very first in the series, there are moments in Gran Turismo 7 where it almost feels like a remake of the 1997 original. Gran Turismo 7 is much more than the sum of its nostalgia.
Gran Turismo 7 menu books
Gran Turismo 7 is the most inviting GT ever, with dozens of hours of curated races and quests designed to introduce a new generation of players to the classic GT experience. GT7 achieves this via the Gran Turismo Café, an eccentric but effective little hub that Polyphony's developers placed right in the middle of its world map. The café owner assigns you specific races and tasks through a series of 39 "menu books". As you work through these, new drivers will gradually become familiar with how GT works. This starts with acquiring licenses, finding and buying cars, customizing and racing. Some of this may seem like hard work to longtime GT players, but the racing events that the Gran Turismo Café intentionally takes us through all form part of the long list of career races. A decent collection of premium cars is offered for perusing the menu books.
More cars
This way you'll be able to win far more cars than you can afford in your first week of GT7. The payouts aren't particularly fancy, and the cost of auto upgrades can be surprisingly high for some items, such as: Even neat ideas, like the wide range of official manufacturer paint colors you can use in the design booth, annoyingly come at a cost.
Thematic trios
Nonetheless, collecting each themed trio of cars for the GT Café menu books, such as European classic compacts or Japanese retro sports icons, also unlocks a serious short video showcasing the cars and explaining their relevance to automotive culture. These vignettes are clearly aimed at people with a limited knowledge of automotive history. Polyphony tries to add context to why certain cars are there. While some of these collections are historically very robust and can correctly represent the lineage of certain iconic models, some others are paralyzed by the limited pool of GT7 vehicles to draw from. For example, GT7's Supra and GT-R collections are great examples of menu books spanning decades of engine development, but others need to take a little more of a grab bag approach. GT7's surpass 400 vehicle roster sounds good on paper and it surpasses the nearly 350 the 2017 GT Sport had after several years of updating, but accounts for several variations of the Fantasy Vision GT vehicles, which are race car versions of road cars and then the inverted “street car” versions of some of these race cars, that 400 number shrinks a bit. It's only about half of the cars available in Forza Motorsport 7, the rival racer originally inspired by it.
your garage
The reality is that the garage in GT7 is nowhere near as rich as you might expect and not as up to date. With few exceptions, most manufacturers tend to peak around 2017. If you're expecting to see high-profile cars from the last two or three years, like the latest McLaren or every Tesla made since 2012, you'll be disappointed.
The flair
Crucially, though, the car's handling is pretty much impeccable. Virtually every single car feels significantly different than the one before. Retro road cars feel languid and loose, and they can get even wilder with some extra oomph squished under the hood when the right performance tuning returns to the series after their absence from GT Sport. Modern sports cars feel a little more grounded, but they're nothing like the specific racing models, which are stiff and cling to the tarmac like their tires have claws. The off-road handling, especially how it handles jumps in GT7, is fantastic on tarmac.
The DualSense and Gran Turismo 7
The DualSense does an excellent job with GT7. Curb response is particularly nuanced, and there are some other feedbacks unique to certain tracks. The controller whirrs as you whip across the metal grates that span the Tokyo expressway. That this buzz feels different in your hands than the tap of a gear change is exactly what defines the DualSense.
The ride quality
It remains a shame, however, that Polyphony keeps compromising its high ride quality by insisting on frustrating rolling starts for Career Mode events, repeating the same mistake GT6 made. In a real car race, the cars drive tightly in two rows for rolling starts. But in GT7 career races, the cars are in single file, about 50 meters apart, and you're always placed in the last places. In a 20-op race at Mount Panorama, this means that by the time you cross the start line, the leader has already made it all the way up the mountain straight and is about to cut. To put it simply, that's more than a kilometer away. These ridiculous protrusions mean that career events are less of a race and more of a chase. You don't fight for position on the track with backmarkers. You just race past them and try to make up for the immense starting deficit. The race really just boils down to overtaking challenge of which GT7 already officially has a series of addictive driving mission challenges. What is puzzling is that GT7 has a great custom race creator that offers grid starts.
search game
Starting with GT7 on PS5, you have a choice of two graphics modes: a performance mode that prioritizes frame rate at all times, and a ray tracing mode that applies ray tracing to specific non-gameplay scenarios. You can switch between these at any time. Ray tracing can be active in things like photo mode, replays, and the garage. With ray tracing, the camera tends to shake a bit when panning through interiors. Without ray tracing, the cars look sharper and better.
The daytime
In fact, GT7's greatest lighting victory has nothing to do with its ray tracing mode at all: its fantastic time-of-day effects bathe the fabulous array of racetracks in the most realistic and ever-changing light. The clear afternoon sun tints pink, giving way to the purple hues of dawn atop Mount Panorama. It's impressive and distracting. GT7's dynamic time of day and weather effects aren't a first for the genre, but they've finally taken its tracks to the next level.
Details
It's just an all-around great looking package. This includes the smaller details, from the way the pit crews in championship races climb over fences, pump their fists and wave flags on the last lap, to tow hooks, decals and unique aero parts that appear naturally on tuned-up AI opponents appear as you rise in the competitive ranks. These aero parts are the result of a neat wing editor that allows a variety of endplates and wing heights to be selected, rather than settling for a small handful of presets, and are just one of many innovations featured in the cosmetics and GT7 hidden are performance adjustments. The settings screen gives many options. It's now much easier to keep your most popular cars on track when performance limits fluctuate between events by simply adding ballast or shutting down the engine computer, rather than going back to the garage to dismantle parts to fit something race-legal .
The Music Library
While the Gran Turismo Café is a clever experiment that works, GT7's new music features, which were a big focus of February's in-depth GT7 reveal, feel like a bust. You'll be disappointed by a supposedly vast library of music, ranging from largely forgotten to downright weird. The Music Replay feature works as advertised. The race replay cameras are dynamically generated around the track based on how fast your car is going and changing to the beat of the music. But the effect isn't particularly seismic or rousing. Music Rally, an arcade-style mode where you start with a set number of beats that tick down as a song plays and need to be filled up by passing expansion gates, has proven particularly odd. As it stands, however, the six Music Rally events currently available tend to be a little whimsical and boring.
offline modes
This is one of only two modes that work offline. As with GT Sport before, everything else in single player requires an online connection except for an arcade mode with a tiny selection of cars. That you can't access the online multiplayer in this case is obvious, but the fact that you can't even access the two-player offline is baffling. This unnecessary connectivity isn't as much of a problem for most people in 2022 as it was a few years ago, but it's still something to be aware of.
The PvP online component
While the PvP online component was really at the core of GT Sport, GT7 doesn't emphasize it in the same way, letting the single-player campaign flex its muscles. However, with rotating scheduled races and championships, Sport mode in GT7 still works the same as it does in GT Sport. GT7 adds a few more low-stakes multiplayer options, including lobbies where players can meet on most circuits, play around without specific race settings, and just chat, compare cars, and cruise. These could descend into chaos after GT7 launches, but I think the idea is reasonable.
Conclusion
Gran Turismo 7 is a modern blend of the forward-thinking format of the original Gran Turismo and GT Sport's rigorous but highly successful focus on competitive online racing. It's a strong podium performance from developer Polyphony Digital. With gorgeous graphics, an amazing driving experience, and tons of racing options, it's the best the series has been since its dominant PlayStation 2 era. It does have some significant flaws, however, including the fact that it continues to cripple its career mode races with horribly buggy roll starts, its car roster isn't as comprehensive as the competition, and its always-online single-player mode still seems unnecessarily punishing. But all of that is on the margins of GT7's stellar driving experiences, which are further enhanced by the PS5's beautiful visuals and intense and tasteful haptic feedback via the DualSense controller.
