Gran Turismo 5: Final Impressions

Gran Turismo 5
System: PS3
Release Year: 2010
IGN Score: 8.5


Gran Turismo is one of my favorite gaming series of all time. I don't have the time logged, but it has to be in the top three or four all time for me in terms of most hours spent total playing a gaming series, with most of those hours spent on Gran Turismo 4. It's been 6 years since Gran Turismo 4 was released on the PS2. During the past 6 years we have heard a lot about Gran Turismo 5 and have been frustrated with numerous delays. I would have to say that GT5 was the most anticipated game of all time for me. I have had time to sit down and play it for more than 20 hours and have several thoughts, most of which are good but some are kind of bad.

GT5 immediately has a familiar feel. You have licensing exams, A-Spec and B-Spec, a garage, the Sunday Cup, confusing menus, they all return to GT5. It immediately feels nostalgic and for long time fans of the series I think this is a good thing. They have added some great new features as well. I love the addition of NASCAR in the game and finally the Special Challenges section is fun and makes sense. The AMG challenges around the Nurburgring are my favorite. Karting is surprisingly fun as well.

Speaking of familiar, a lot of the old tracks from previous games return in GT5. Thankfully they got rid of some of the more dreadful tracks and kept mostly the better original tracks in my opinion. Between the real tracks and original fictional tracks, the real-life tracks are better and there is a great collection of real-life tracks as well, including several famous F1 tracks like Monza and I was glad to see return of Nurburgring, Laguna Seca, and Circuit de la Sarthe, as well as the debut of Indianapolis and Daytona. Overall the track selection is quite solid and a number of terrific circuits are recognized.

I really enjoy the music while on the menu screens. The music during the races, however, is pretty bad in my opinion. I actually turned it off while I race because it was annoying me so much. Truthfully, one of the worst soundtracks of the series.

I am going to echo what numerous other reviewers have said about the graphics. The tracks and scenery look fantastic. Ninety percent of the time the cars look fantastic too, but sometimes, and usually it's with the "standard" cars, the cars look pretty average. GT5 is a pretty game for sure but I think it has solid PS3 graphics. Nothing really blew me out of the water.

The addition of on-line play was an obvious must and luckily is a ton of fun. I have met up with friends on-line three or four times and thus far have had no problems with connections or frame rates when playing over the net. Playing on-line is probably the best feature of this game in my opinion.

Finally I wanna talk about the game play, which is a huge disappointment for me. There is so much wrong with the game play in my opinion I am going to switch to bullets to make my points.

• I wrote an article back in March expressing 4 or 5 things that I wanted to see in GT5. I feel like they only kind of answered one of those things and that is the number of cars. GT games have always had 6 cars on track at once and finally that number was increased in GT5. I was hoping to see between 20 to 24. Instead I got 8-16, which isn't bad. I was glad to see they increased this number.
• The AI drivers are as dumb as ever. They are like zombies. They have no emotion, they don't react when you hit them, they never change their racing line, they basically drive like robots. I see no difference between the AI drivers in GT5 and the AI drivers in GT4.
• There still seems to be little to no consequence for hitting other cars, cutting corners, or wrecking yourself. I flipped my AMG Mercedes (which was awesome), landed on my wheels, and continued to drive to victory like nothing happened. They say there is damage but I see very little of it on screen and more than 20 hours into the game it hasn't affected any of my races at all.
• Racing ability seems to have little effect on the outcomes of races because you can still buy most of your wins. Who cares if you wreck 100 times when your car has 400 more bhp than the other drivers? It wasn't until level 16 where I came across a series where I couldn't buy/modify a car quick enough to win while driving recklessly.
• Speaking of cars, the entire system they have on this game for cars is just weird. First off, they say there is more than 1,000 cars, but you can actually only buy what seems to be a couple of hundred. Then they limit which ones you can buy based on your level. There are tons of cool cars in the used car section but they come and go without warning and often cost $10,000,000 or more. I'd love to have an old Ford GT40 but don't have $19,000,000 laying around or a level 23 ranking. Plus the cars they give you for wins are almost entirely useless and sell for next to nothing. Gone are the days where you could win a cool car that could actually be used in a series then sell it for big cash. Now we get crappy cars and the ability to look at a lot of cool cars but not buy any of them.
  
• The rain effects and racing at night with your headlights are really cool additions to this game. Why aren't they used more often? I am on level 19 and have only seen this aspect of the game sparingly.

I really feel like this game focuses way too much on the cars and the game play suffers as a result. I love buying cool cars (the ones that are available) and taking them to the shop and adding horsepower and handling and all of that stuff to see how fast I can go. One of my favorite things to do on the game (beside on-line play) is buy a new car and fix it up and take it to the track to do individual hot laps to see which car in my garage is the quickest. I really think the game shines in this aspect. Each car handles different, sounds different, drives different, and you can really feel that as you turn lap after lap searching for perfection. When you are in races you loose all of this as you blow by Honda Civics in your Bugatti Veyron. I think the game would have been much better if they would have dropped about 400 of the pointless cars (does anyone honestly enjoy the Lupo Challenge??) and focused a bit more on actual racing.

With all of this being said, I do think the game is fun and overall is good. I love racing and racing games and Gran Turismo is one of my favorite gaming series of all time. With that being said, I was expecting the best racing game ever. I don't think GT5 is even the best racing game on the PS3. The on-track action in F1: 2010 is much better. If anything, I think GT5 could have easily been called Gran Turismo 4: HD as it is basically a fancier, shinier version of the previous game from 2004.