Gran Turismo 7 Review – Earning Its Place On The Podium

Every little mistake can send you crashing off the tracks. It doesn’t have a rewind function like in most modern racing games. This makes it difficult to feel the tension between victory and defeat. Unfortunately, if you want to use the assist tools to help you better compete on the track, the drive-line tool, which tells you the best path to follow through the course, is not only less informative than those of Gran Turismo’s contemporaries, but it’s also unreliable. On several occasions, I followed the line’s advice and still slammed into the barrier, only to realize the brake indicator didn’t properly populate on the track. Every time I got into one of these accidents, Gran Turismo 7’s lack of damage modeling took me out of the experience; when a game is so focused on realistic visuals and controls, emerging from a high-speed wreck with little damage is jarring.

Polyphony Digital’s adoration of auto culture remains evident as you progress through Gran Turismo 7’s unconventional career mode. Constantly returning to the in-game café, where you retrieve quests like collecting specific vehicles or winning a grand prix, you get an effective tour of the game’s many modes and offerings. Each time you complete a car collection mission, you’re treated to a rundown of the real-world history of whatever the theme is; I learned a lot about the history of the Ford Mustang in my early hours. Gran Turismo 7 clearly explains what to do each time you are given a new objective. Side modes like music-based time trials, missions-based challenges and special license events had me pressing the retry button to ensure I got a faster time.

Progression happens every step of the way, giving you incentive to play “just one more race.” I lost track of time on more occurrences than I can count as I discovered the reward for the next race was a car I coveted. I was hooked by the career mode’s structure around vehicle collecting, with each activity rewarding you with money, cars, and more. Your collection grows with more cars than ever before, which unlocks more features and missions. The cyclical ecosystem Polyphony Digital leveraged in Gran Turismo 7 is satisfying, and by placing the emphasis more on building a garage than winning races, I rarely felt my progress stall, even if I couldn’t take home the checkered flag in each event. To give myself the best possible chance of finishing first, I enjoyed juicing my favourite rides with the powerful tuning features.

Unfortunately, multiplayer often puts a halt to the excitement. Participating in scheduled Sport Events, which you register for and then wait until it starts, is an option. You can also join multiplayer lobbyes. Sport events are great fun – I particularly love Gran Turismo 7’s emphasis on being well-mannered in your driving, actively discouraging collisions – but they take too long to get into the action. You may have to wait up to 10 minutes for the start of a Sport event after you sign up. You can still drive qualifying laps and practice while you wait, but these events should only start once the full session has started. Lobbies are a great way to circumvent the waiting period while setting your own rules, but with the front pages often populated by near-empty groups, the barrier to jump into a multiplayer session sometimes wasn’t worth the hassle.

Gran Turismo 7 offers a great racing experience, despite its shortcomings in multiplayer. It is a great game that places emphasis on collecting cars and pays respect to both the past and present of racing and culture. Gran Turismo 7 has some amazing driving mechanics, and you have many guided ways of engaging with the game. It can spend too much time on the track at times, but every single cutscene was clearly made with love. This sentiment is even stronger in the song.