Gran Turismo 7 review: The Playstation 5 experience

Gran Turismo was, for many years, the benchmark. For well over a decade I was a video game reviewer and every serious racing game had to be viewed through the Gran Turismo lens.

“Forza Motorsport? What’s that?” Someone would ask me. “It’s like Gran Turismo for the Xbox.” Immediately that person knew what it was, whether or not they were a gamer.

It was such a juggernaut that every new PlayStation console was announced with the franchise acting as a launch title. Without fail, Polyphony Digital would miss the deadline. Didn’t matter though, because if there’s one thing you can count on with this series – it’s out when it’s done.

While not all launches – particularly latter-day releases with the opportunity to drop an 80GB patch on you – have gone smoothly, they were games you could get stuck into straight away.

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Then came Gran Turismo Sport

GT Sport came at the end of an extremely long wait and was the only PlayStation 4 release for the series.

Sport also signalled a shift in philosophy, moving the emphasis firmly to online racing series.

It was still quite serious, though. Sport mode included online races supported by the FIA and Lewis Hamilton cheerfully slapped his name on it, which must have annoyed Kamui Kobayashi who provided a lot of technical support for the game.

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What it didn’t have was the thing that so many GT fans loved.

A good many of those fans aren’t really car enthusiasts but one of the great things about the game was that you’d fire it up on day one with 20,000 credits and buy a Honda Jazz or a Toyota Yaris and start the grind, collecting cars as you went.

It was a sore point with fandom, even though Gran Turismo Sport was a technically brilliant game with regular updates that added new tracks, cars and sometimes features.

You could still get going on a car collection but you missed out on the ridiculous joy of fitting performance parts and winding your R32 GT-R up to a kajillion horsepower then trying to drive it on road tyres without looping it out of every corner.

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Gran Turismo 7 arrives...

...into a completely different world to Gran Turismo Sport. eSport has taken off, with Formula 1 teams fielding their own crews in Codemasters’ F1 series of online races.

Fans can’t get their hands on the PlayStation 5 for which this game was so lovingly made, despite also running on PlayStation 4. Fanatec can’t keep up with demand for its excellent wheel and pedal packages (I say Fanatec is excellent because I have a set, but there are other brands).

Sim racing rigs are now a thing that normal people consider. I’m a member of a couple of groups on Facebook full of normal people discovering that spending $13,000 on a sim racing rig a) doesn’t make them better and b) doesn’t provide them with 30 hours in a day to go racing. But they have taken off in a way they hadn't in 2017, a pre-pandemic world when people went out to drive or walk or do other things.

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Anyway. Gran Turismo 7 is back to the glory days of the franchise. Once again you’re presented with a world to explore, a small starting budget, the GT Auto workshop and the option of a Toyota Prius as your starting car.

For single-player mode, the centrepiece of the game is the cafe. This might sound ridiculous but it’s a joy to look at every time the game cuts to it. Someone has spent an awful lot of time rendering a beautifully-lit woodland scene with a homely restaurant in the middle. It’s one of those typically Japanese ideas that sounds a bit odd on paper but works a treat in the game.

Here in the cafe, you’re presented with menu books and you’re guided through a series of races to collect cars, tracks and perform various tasks with the side benefit of taking you through the game's various components.

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These menu books also serve to introduce you to car culture and technical information about the various terms used in the game, so if you don’t know much, you can enjoy the history lessons and sometimes seriously cheesy music.

The licence system is back, too and is as difficult as ever to complete with all-gold results. Passing these licences again grants you further access within the game, this time unlocking the various levels of the upgrades regime.

This is one of the parts of the game fans so sorely missed in Gran Turismo Sport, where the upgrade process was nothing like as interesting. You couldn’t fit a supercharger to a Jazz to see what happens. You could buy tyres but you couldn’t fit carbon brakes to a Prius. Now it’s all back and it’s glorious fun fitting parts to see what happens.

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I reviewed GT7 on PlayStation 5 and did a good few hours on the controller rather than jumping straight in with a wheel. PS5 controllers have a few tricks packed into them that the PS4 ones don’t, like haptic feedback in the triggers, which most of us use for accelerator and brake.

What’s really nice about the haptic feedback in the PS5 controller is you now have a bit more feel about what the tyres and brakes are doing. One of the great mysteries in most racing games is getting any feedback at all save for some tyre squeal. You have a pretty good idea what’s going on and so you can decide whether to hit the brakes – that trigger pulses if you’ve got ABS – and whether to go for more understeer or lurid oversteer.

It’s by far the best controller experience of just about any racing game on console.

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If you’re interested in racing online, though, a wheel isn’t a must but it will make things far more enjoyable. You don’t have to spend the dumb money I did on a Fanatec setup but a few hundred bucks on a quality wheel and pedal set will truly lift the experience. As it will with the cavernous single-player experience.

What’s better about racing online is that you don’t have to deal with the aggressively dumb AI cars. While a note that came with the review code said that the AI will improve with a day one patch, it’s going to have to be a big improvement. The other cars seem pointlessly aggressive but they’re just dumb and seem unaware that you’re there.

Online isn’t a dead cert for better-behaved racers, but the more you race, the faster you progress to lobbies with more serious drivers. I’ve raced a reasonable amount in GT Sport and found that in the lobbies dominated by B- and A-grade drivers, it was definitely better.

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I was unable to get into a GT7 multiplayer race given the lack of people with the game prior to launch, but if it’s as good as GT Sport – even with its well-documented limitations – then it should be a riot with the Daily Races making a very welcome return, as well as the more serious FIA racing.

Gran Turismo 7 also fixes one of the most irritating things of games past and delivers on the broken promise of GT Sport – faster loading times. Tracks are ready so much more quickly on PS5. So many of us play these games casually and having to wait ages for tracks to load, wasting precious time, was frustrating.

Polyphony has massively picked up the pace for PS5 players and it means you can pack in more racing for that precious half-hour you’ve snatched.

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Gran Turismo 7 isn’t so much a return to form – GT Sport was pretty good as far as I was concerned – but a return to the form. It’s back to its more friendly self, a game you can pick up and play with fantastic visuals and an excellent handling/tyre model.

There are more realistic driving games but they require a lot more effort and investment of time and equipment. GT7 is fun with the controller or the tens of thousands some crazy people spend on sim racing rigs.

And that’s the Gran Turismo experience. Anyone with even a passing interest or a consuming passion for cars and/or videogames can enjoy it. You can’t ask for more than that from a game.

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Gran Turismo 7 Standard Edition

PlayStation 5

With over 420 cars available at Brand Central* and the Used Car Dealership* from day one, Gran Turismo 7 recreates the look and feel of classic motors and bleeding-edge supercars alike in unparalleled detail. Each car handles differently and feels unique as you navigate over 90 track routes in dynamic weather conditions, including classic courses from GT history.

*Internet connection required to download.

Buy now from Amazon