Gran Turismo 7 review: the grandaddy of racing games

When you turn on your computer, a splash screen will remind you. Gran Turismo 7, this is the 25th-anniversary year of Sony’s flagship PlayStation racing game. It’s also been more than eight years and one whole console generation since we last saw a mainline, numbered entry in the series, the 2013 PlayStation 3 swan song Gran Turismo 6. The new game is dominated by these long periods of time. Maybe they explain why it’s so preoccupied with legacy.

In the quarter century since “the real driving simulator” became a sensation with its involved physics and grainy photorealism, our relationship with cars has changed. We are on the verge of losing our love for cars due to climate change. Are cars still cool enough to be fashionable in 2022? “You won’t find as many people talking about car culture anymore,” director Kazunori Yamauchi said recently, adding that GT7This new reality was in the forefront of our minds when we built it.

In the past years, our relationship to racing has also changed. Gran Turismo 6. Back then, its main competitor was the Forza Motorsport series, which was made in GT’s image. A spinoff of those games is now a huge success. They put vibes first, and borrow the open-world adventure design, which has led to the amazing Forza Horizon 5, in which the cars — and the racing — were only part of the point.

an Alfa Romeo racing car crossing the finish line on the Trial Mountain circuit in Gran Turismo 7

Polyphony Digital aimed to the future in 2017 however. Gran Turismo Sport, a multiplayer-first, live-service-inspired detour. Many things were right about it, including the integration of hardcore simulator safety ratings systems into driver and safety rating systems. iRacing into a more approachable arena. It launched with a thin shadow of what Gran Turismo fans expect from a Gran Turismo title. A traditional campaign for one player was not included, while many GT features such as the car modification system, which has been an iconic feature of the series’ history, were only added as an afterthought.

Yamauchi, his team and their mission are to take on this world. Gran Turismo 7. They want Gran Turismo to have all of the great features that they are familiar with. They want — quite desperately, it seems — to get people excited about cars again. The all-encompassing series must carry the entire history of motoring into the future.

It’s a testament to their enormous skill and passion that they largely succeed. Its ambitions are high and the content is plentiful. Gran Turismo 7 always feels slick and manageable, and it’s a treat to see Polyphony bring its renowned technical gloss to the PlayStation 5. But still, it’s not what you would call light on its feet. Sometimes it feels clogged by tradition while other times, it is held back by a heavy guide hand.

a blue Porsche 911 sits outside the Gran Turismo Café in Gran Turismo 7

That’s not to say it’s without the eccentric flights of fancy that have long livened up a series with an undeserved reputation for dryness. (GT6, after all, took you to Moon’s surface.) You will see the main menu before you can even view it. Gran Turismo 7 You are invited to participate in Music Rally. This is a new, hilariously inept time-attack game in which your goal is to travel the most distance in one song. As if making a play for the lucrative octogenarian demographic, Yamauchi’s opening gambit is to sit you behind the wheel of a 1956 Porsche to the strains of “Hooked on Classics (Parts 1 & 2).” The next round has you buzzing around Tokyo in a tiny Honda while Idris Elba raps at you. It’s the exact opposite of cool, but it’s very charming.

After you’re in the actual game, another player is introduced to you GT7 innovation, the GT Café. Here, while enjoying the relaxed ambiance and smooth jazz, you pick up “Menus,” which are essentially quests that both gate and curate your progress through the game, gradually unlocking tracks, championships, and features, as well as rewarding you with cars. The Café is also where you fall into conversation (of a sort) with a collection of stock-art talking heads who are as eager to educate you on automotive history as they are to guide you around the game. While some of these people are actual-life GT drivers or car designers, they speak in the same awkward and stilted voice that Gran Turismo uses. Yamauchi’s voice, maybe.

The Café is Both a boon as well as a handicap GT7. As a guided tour of the game and its garage of cars, it’s thoughtful, and a welcome contrast to the basic grid of events that previous GTs would unceremoniously dump on players. But as the main spine of the campaign, it’s linear and restrictive. You can spend a lot of time playing the game and not have enough unlocks to allow you to choose the vehicle you want to drive.

The Gran Turismo 7 map, with access to all the game’s features

Similar slow pace is observed in the economy. You earn credit slowly, and some cars remain out of reach for long periods. It’s equally possible to blow most of your cash on tuning up your favored ride. You may need to work off the beaten path in order to earn credits for keeping up with entry requirements. Gran Turismo is a Japanese-based role-playing video game, and embraces concepts like grinding or overleveling. GT7’s economy seems cynically engineered to encourage players to buy credits from the PlayStation Store. On the other hand, needing to think about how you spend your money, and lusting for exotic cars that seem out of reach, can feel like a welcome corrective to the absurd “it’s raining cars” overabundance of Forza Horizon.

On the track, though, this is quintessential Gran Turismo, boasting both exquisite technical refinement and a dedication to the same principles upon which the series was founded in the late ’90s. The handling model remains the best this side of PC simulators, blending credibility and approachability, with a tactile, “planted” feel that’s a world away from the theatrical drifting of Forza Horizon. The DualSense is Sony’s best controller for racing games yet, which has as much to do with its sturdy ergonomics as with its fancy haptic feedback. The adjustable triggers let you know when the brakes are stiff or if there is a loss in traction. While the car’s body vibrates, the adaptive triggers give the information. Improved audio plays a big part as well, once again eschewing the heightened approach of other games in favor of something more muted — but also more communicative — especially when it comes to wind and tire noise.

An in-car cockpit view from a race in Gran Turismo 7

The cutting-edge of graphics rendering is Polyphony, too. Gran Turismo 7Visually, it is stunning, whether in the raytraced replays or the almost impossible photo mode. Or in the smooth racing action that boasts beautiful dynamic weather and time transitions. At its best, the game can conjure an acute, utterly believable sense of time and place: I won’t forget chasing taillights through flickering fingers of fog as the sun went down over Australia’s Mount Panorama circuit.

As a Gran Turismo fan who hasn’t had the full-fat Gran Turismo experience in eight years, I just want to gorge myself on all of this — which is why the overly patient hand-holding can grate. To make perfectly decent road cars racer-like, I will use the livery editor to spray them with garish stickers. To see if my beloved pre-2000s cars might be available, I plan to spend hours at the car dealership. I would love to look at rims, pointlessly wash and change my car’s oil at GT Auto. The Eunos Roadster Mk1 that I have in my real life is photographed in front famous landmarks around the world in the Scapes mode. I would like to see the detailed descriptions of each vehicle included in this car collection. I’d love to race for gold in the rigorous License Tests as well as in the many Mission Racing situations, which made their comeback from. GT Sport.

But does any of this make sense, in 2022, to someone who doesn’t already belong to the church of Gran Turismo? It’s luxurious but also highly specific, both to a love of cars and to the subtly off-kilter, defiantly uncool culture of Gran Turismo itself. The guiding principle holding it all together is Yamauchi’s quixotic mission to preserve, curate, and evangelize all of car culture — a mission he’s been pursuing in earnest since at least 2004, when he included the 1886 Daimler Motor Carriage (among other curiosities) in the sprawling Gran Turismo 4. Gran Turismo 7It is perhaps the strongest expression of that desire yet. It’s authoritative, enthusiastic, and touchingly sincere, but also a bit stuffy and didactic and old-fashioned — like a favored oddball uncle cornering you at a family gathering.

a gray BMW road car with a white/red/blue/light blue racing stripe awaits service in the GT Auto mode of Gran Turismo 7

So it’s important to highlight that Gran Turismo 7Also, the multiplayer Sport mode is available. GT SportNamed. It’s only been possible to do limited testing ahead of the game’s launch, but it already seems safe to assume that it will continue to be leagues ahead of any other competitive racing experience available on consoles. Although it’s not a casual game, the mode is much more accessible for those with average skills (like me). It captures all that is great about PC sims: fairness and sportsmanship. There are also simple, online lobbies and casual hangout areas, plus a local split-screen for two players.

If it’s ever tempting to think that Polyphony has been left behind by the times, we should remember that the Sport mode is its greatest achievement of the past decade, and that it remains without peer in its field. And if it seems striking that GT and its closest current mass-market competitor, Forza Horizon, now seem to be operating in different worlds — stylistically, philosophically, structurally — we should consider ourselves lucky to be able to enjoy two such distinctive approaches, both executed at the highest level. You can find it here. GT7, Gran Turismo continues to be a glorious anomaly: a game made with different goals and to different standards than any other; a game made in service to a singular, individual vision; a game that’s all science and engineering on the outside, and all history and heart within.

Gran Turismo 7The game will be available on PlayStation 5 (and PlayStation 4) March 4. Sony Interactive Entertainment provided a code for the download of this game to review on PS5. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. They do not affect editorial content. However, Vox Media might earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. Find out more. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

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