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Nothing says PlayStation like Gran Turismo. And even though I loved it in my Gran Turismo 7 review and have gone back to it a couple of times since, sometimes I find myself wondering: is it really that good? When the intro starts, with all the nostalgic photographs and video clips of The Beatles, Einstein, the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford's factory line, I remember that Gran Turismo has been known to disappear up its own exhaust pipe from time to time.
But then the black and white pictures leave the screen, replaced with game footage, and I remember. The cars thump over impeccably-rendered kerbs, kicking up dust as they race over bare earth and glide serenely over snow. There's even the Castrol-liveried Toyota Celica as seen in my beloved Sega Rally Championship, looking better than any other game. Better, perhaps, than real life. OK, I'm sold. Let's play Gran Turismo 7 again.
Driving that just works
When you come back to Gran Turismo 7 after a while away, the attention to detail hits home. The crowd cheers through your DualSense controller, and every menu interaction can be felt through haptic feedback in the controller. It's a bit like when Steve Jobs showed off the first iPhone and told us that we'd be able to touch our music. There's a real sense of pride in the user interface, and that shines through in every feature.
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The game has been updated many times since I reviewed it back in 2022. I reacquaint myself via the second round of Music Rally stages, ticking them off with just a couple of retries. It's a really gentle way to alight back in the Gran Turismo world, with no penalty for cutting corners or running into other drivers, which is welcome when the game proper is so insistent that we drive in a sportsmanlike manner. By the time the last Music Rally stage arrives and the event starts just before dawn, dashboard dials aglow as I drive through the silhouetted trees of the Nordschleife, I remember why this is such a class act.
Gran Turismo is about the racing, of course it is, and the very precise mechanisms of driving a racing car on the ragged edge of adhesion. But it's also about the things other games overlook when they're trying to deliver the same fundamental experience. It's about the reflections in the windscreen. The way your car's shadow moves around you like a sundial as you navigate a hairpin high on a ridge with the setting sun behind you. It’s about the magic of blood red tail lights moving through the darkness ahead, and the snarl of engines on the start line. Kazunori Yamauchi and his team at Polyphony Digital understand what makes the fundamental act of driving such a pleasure, and this game absolutely captures that essence.
Last time I played the game I was testing a direct drive force feedback racing wheel, and of course that's the best way to play such a realistic simulation of automotive physics. But I've actually enjoyed going old-school and using a standard DualSense pad. There was a time on PS2 where I'd use the right stick for acceleration and braking, but the triggers on the PS5 pad are so good, I don't need that extra waggle space for extreme finesse.
This finesse is highlighted beautifully by the additional license test series. I took great pride in obtaining a gold rank on every original license test, including that ridiculous semi-wet lap of Spa. But the new licenses are ultra-hardcore. The irony is, as 'The Professor' Alain Prost once said, "if it looks like I'm going fast, I'm not". That's exactly what these license tests show you. Slide around corners, bump over kerbs and run out wide on the exit of corners and you'll see that your ghost car is actually way slower than if you just maintain absolute control.
Gold? It's one of the hardest challenges I've ever faced in a game.
It's remarkable just how much the game teaches you about adhesion, racing lines, and momentum in the form of speed carried through a series of corners. One of the new wet road tests sees you navigating a short sequence of corners through an inner-city track lined with walls. If you touch the walls, you lose. It's hard enough just to get through the track unscathed, harder still to get a Silver time. But Gold? It’s one of the hardest challenges I've ever faced in a game. But then, as always, clearing it makes you feel like there was loads of time left on the table. And when you can feasibly lose 0.7 seconds in just one corner, it makes real racing drivers seem like gods. The whole F1 field is often separated by some 1.5 seconds over a whole lap. It's this constant knowledge that you can always be better that makes the game so compelling as you teach yourself to be more disciplined with your control inputs.
Over time, however, Gran Turismo 7 becomes as much about instinct as discipline. I love the way in a single moment I can gauge the speed of my car, its acceleration, the comparative acceleration of the car ahead, and project those trajectories into the future while computing the adhesion of my tires on this particular track surface as I turn a corner. It's like a complex equation with a perfect answer as I glide past said opponent within 10cm of his rear bumper. In 4K at 60fps it is simply magnificent as all of its calculations resolve in what can genuinely be described as art in motion.
That's what Gran Turismo does that no other racing sim gets close to equalling. Sure, we have amazing racing sims in the shape of Assetto Corsa, iRacing and the rest, and Forza Motorsport 7 was an incredible high point before it was deleted to make room for the disappointing Forza Motorsport. But nobody has managed to recreate racing with as much class as GT7.
Without adding in serious, destructive car damage, I still don't see how the series can feasibly surpass this entry. It needs something big to change if it's going to become indistinguishable from real life because there's just too much perfection in these cars when the game simply won't allow you to destroy them. Real racing is about the beauty and the romance but also the danger, the moment-to-moment risk of losing everything. But until someone makes a bold move and persuades car manufacturers that games need to replicate the extreme consequences of reckless racing, we'll just have to do with perfection. And I will grumble as I say this: perfection's not so bad, I suppose.
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