: it may only be two dozen shy of PCARS2, but it feels like a much bigger gap when you’re browsing.
0Gran Turismo Sport PlayStation 4 Review
Gran Turismo Sport PlayStation 4 Review
GRAN TURISMO SPORTPRODUCT REVIEWS 146 October 20, 2017 by Kyle Patrick
How many things in your life have you kept for 20 years? Even better: how many of these two-decade old items have gone relatively unchanged?
The Gran Turismo franchise launched nearly 20 years ago, in December of ’97. It shared the year with two other global phenomenons: Pokemon and Harry Potter. To say that both of those pop culture behemoths have changed and evolved since then is putting it mildly.
To its credit, Gran Turismo has evolved as technology improved. But outside of the spin-off Prologues and Concepts, the mainline games largely followed the same format. You’d start with a lowly car, enter the Sunday Cup, earn credits, upgrade the car, and rinse and repeat. Eventually, you’d have a sprawling collection of virtual rides. It was automotive escapism.
That’s all changed now. At last, a new Gran Turismo title is available on PlayStation 4. GT Sport is the single biggest change Polyphony Digital has made to the franchise since it began. With that five-letter word doubling as its raison d’être, the big question is: does Sport succeed in forging a new path for the series?
Sony provided us with a review code for the game late last week. We played it on a standard PS4, with a DS4, Fanatec CSL Elite, and Logitech G29.
Content and Value For Money –
First, the good news. Upon loading GT Sport up for the first time, it’s immediately apparent this is a Gran Turismo game. The menus ooze class, putting the stars of the show — the cars — front and center. Loading times are also commendably short.
This being GT, there’s still a cursor on screen for navigation. Thanks to the anti-minimalism of the main menu, the cursor is definitely needed. It’s all part of the GT charm, you see! None of the menus suffer the input lag of the PS3 era games, which is a blessing.
The meat and potatoes of a racing game are the car and track rosters. It’s here that GT Sport fails to impress. The car count, in typical GT fashion, only tells part of the story: it may only be two dozen shy of PCARS2, but it feels like a much bigger gap when you’re browsing.
I’m not going to call them “duplicates” — not least because they’re not — but the PD-designed Group cars give this game far, far less actual variety than its competition, or previous GTs. Head over to Mitsubishi, for example, and you’ll find variation upon variation of the Evo X, and a Vision GT.
Yes, Vision GT returns. In fact, thanks to Group variations, there are 38 of them (or, about 22% of the roster). Expect more, too: Kazunori Yamauchi has stated the project isn’t even half done.
Despite striving for a class-based structure, the car list just feels lopsided. There are plenty of fictitious cars to plug gaps in a manufacturer’s lineup, like the Gr.4 Veyron or the afore-mentioned suite of Evos. But then you head over to BMW’s lineup and see that the i3 city car is included. Not only that, but there are three Gr.3 Bimmers.
Arguably even more troubling is the track list, though. GT Sport arrives with 17 locations and 40 variations. Of those, only six are real world tracks: Nürburgring, Brands Hatch, Willow Springs, Suzuka, Bathurst, and Interlagos. Not a bad, globe-trotting selection, but it pales in comparison to nearly all of Sport’s competition outside of Assetto Corsa.
The fictional tracks are a mixed bag. There’s three ovals, which is two too many in this game in my opinion. The rally tracks, well, I’ll leave that for the physics section. Tokyo Expressway returns from the beta earlier this year (boo), but with a new layout that feels much more like the classic night-time highway tracks of GTs past (yay).
On the basis of the above, you may have thought Polyphony had lost its track-making mojo. But the rest of the tracks in GT Sport are easily some of the best work the company has done in years. Dragon Trail was a standout in the beta, and it’s joined by the Lago Maggiore.
This flowing Italian circuit has hints of real-world tracks from the country, and is a fantastic drive in some of the quicker stuff. It also has the mother of all banked hairpins: there’s something deeply satisfying about chucking a car through there. The longer Kyoto circuit is also well-suited to fast cars. Alsace Village starts fairly average, almost like a Driveclub (RIP) track, but its back half is a bit of a gem.
Leave the game running for any significant chunk of time and it’ll introduce you to the Museum feature. It typically showcases quick factoids about the marques in the game, but also, rather incongruously, cultural events that have no ties to the automotive world. I’ve seen it called an “inter
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