Gran Turismo 7 is a dad game through and through.
Gran Turismo 7 is a dad game through and through.
“Dad, why have you spent the last 3 hours souping up a Subaru Impreza, is it because mum wouldn’t let you buy one?” is something you would absolutely ask your dad, who has become obsessed with the Subaru Imprezas in Gran Turismo 7.
“Dad, why are you staring at the seat stitches on a Ferrari 458?”
“Dad, why are you sitting in a café that looks like a dream scene from Inception while watching a history lesson on French hatchbacks?”
Gran Turismo 7 is the weirdest racing game in the longest time I can remember, but it’s a refreshing contrast to the over-the-top festival hipster rave that was last year’s Forza Horizon.
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Unlike that series, which turned racing into a fast food sugar rush, the latest Gran Turismo feels like such a sterile, pristine production that it can come across as boring on the surface. That aforementioned café is a real place in-game that you’ll go back to countless times to take on “menu book” missions to progress during the campaign. Those unvoiced history lessons are a constant throughout, too.
For a game ostensibly about going fast, Gran Turismo 7 is entirely okay with taking its sweet old time about absolutely everything. There’s a lot of off-track mandatory activity. It’s more of a Sunday cruise than a Formula One race. But, lean into that and you’ll find a superlative driving experience. One that takes its time to fully reveal its strengths and capabilities, but delivers an unrivaled handling model, a massive roster of tracks and cars, and a ton of customization options to suit almost any player whether they want to race hot hatches, classic muscle or track-focused racers.
The GT series has always had its quirks. But in 2022, developer Polyphony Digital’s approach to racing game design can feel like such a strange departure from modern-day genre norm. It’s like playing a game designed by aliens. The rigorous structure of that campaign can feel limiting at times. The driving starts you off painfully slow, and you really have to delay your gratification before you ever get a hint of real speed. You begin with no tracks available, except one, and you need to put a load of racing in before you feel like you have a varied set of circuits to play around with. You earn cars at a similarly slow pace. Abandon all hope of having an Aston Martin within your first five or six races.
The menus, too, are entirely obtuse and completely nonsensical. Nothing about this game feels easy or streamlined. It’s clear that you’re supposed to sit there, calm and serene, listening to the classical music on the soundtrack, and just be chill. It’s pretty nice once you acclimatize to its rhythm. It feels like a racing game of a bygone age. A Dad Game.
To start, you are met with the longest unskippable introductory film I can remember in a video game. This is the Hideo Kojima Presents of driving games. While the thing looks flashy and is clearly made with love, the inability to just get into the meat of the game is an instant detractor for people who want that quick speed hit. But that won’t come for a while. Campaign modes in racing games are hard to do, but GT7 actually does it really well providing you’re willing to work with its pace.
The world map is barely filled in when you first start the game, but as you complete more of the menu book objectives you’ll open up the raft of different features and points of interest on the world map. The café is your mission hub, but then there’s Brand Central, where you buy new cars. There’s Scapes, where you can take convincingly real snaps of your cars in various places around the world. There’s an auto shop to soup up and customize cars. And a ton more in between. But this all opened up over several hours. Some of it doesn’t necessarily feel worth the time investment. I see the value in in-game photos, but that stuff really doesn’t interest me. It’s the tracks and cars you unlock that are worth it.
Gran Turismo 7’s tracks and cars are a thing of precise beauty. These games have always been the ideal showcase for a new console, and with PlayStation 5 the game absolutely delivers. Lighting is absolutely exquisite – not in the flashy, high contrast JJ Abrams way of games like Horizon Forbidden West. Instead, this light is unmistakably the real deal. Subtle, photorealistic. The way your headlamps beam through the haze of a dusk evening in Kyoto, or the way the sunlight cascades through the multiple layers of cloud over Laguna Seca is entirely convincing. The mix of light, track and metal car is so, so good. Combine that with the game’s driving model and it becomes such a moreish experience. The game might try its best to keep you off-track, but the fact you’re desperate to get back on track is a sign that the mechanical underpinnings of this game are fully doing their job.
You see, so much about the game is clearly about driving – but not necessarily racing. This might seem like a very picky observation, but going into Gran Turismo 7 expecting breakneck wheel-to-wheel racing with incredible AI cars will only leave you disappointed. The racing is good, not great. But the driving itself is peerless. Whether you’re racing in that Subaru, or a Ferrari, or a Renault, or a classic Dodge Charger, every car feels like its own beast to get to grips with at a subtle level. This is something that gets said about a lot of racing games nowadays, but the PS5’s DualSense controller and its haptic rumble technology means GT7 can convey every wheel spin, loss of grip, rubber chicane and more through the triggers and grips of a controller. It feels magnificent.
No matter how each race in the game played out, no matter how slow the car I was driving actually was, that sense of being planted on a track, turning into a corner, managing the grip, finding the limit – and more than once going over it – was what kept me coming back to Gran Turismo 7. It’s absolutely a weird game. It’s absolutely a fundamentally boring one – aren’t all simulators, really – but the dedication to cars and how they interact with tarmac is something you can’t help but come back to time and time again. Maybe I’m a dad now?
Written by Sam White on behalf of GLHF.
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