@hanselthecaretaker Called my name and I always appear...eventually.
You know I am a sucker for Racing Sims. Project Cars, Forza 1,2, and 3, but when it came to the Gran Turismo games my sole experience was a bad time trying to get the lisences in GT1 or 2 on Playstation 1. I remember trying to get a Corvette around a circle track with no assists in the rain and I lost my fucking mind as a kid. Ever since then I never would touch a GT game, figuring that they were always too hardcore for me.
What i liked most about Project Cars 1 & 2, and the early Forze motorsports where the same thing that I likes about Tokyo Xtreme Racer which is an incredibly obscure game series that had two entries on Dreamcast and 1 game on Ps2. Anyway what was really appealing to me about those games is that they had somewhat realistic racing but the core of the game was what is now refered to as the CARpg. Where you start career mode driving boring basic cars that you can tune up to mkae a little better but in order to drive the really cool shit you have to earn your way to the top ranks for super cars and such.
In preparation for this release I actually went and played GT: Sport, which if you don't know is not a real GT game. It's a sort of a showcase game with a bigger focus on multiplayer online races. It is okay for what it is but it isn't the experience I was looking for and it made me worried about GT7 a little bit. If you guys remember my Project Cars 3 impressions i was wholely disappointed by that game because it leaned too heavily on the arcade type of racing and while i didn't think GT would do that, I wondered if the CARpg wouldn't be there the way I wanted.
I did not need to fear because Gt7 is exactly what I wanted. Start your career in a Prius and drive your way through the ranks to super cars. All is finally right with the world.
Gran Turismo 7 is a car lover's game, where all you want to do is take a bunch of different cars (425ish) onto 90 different track set ups and go for a quick drive. You start your career by buying one of three compact cars and visiting the Cafe which is the main focus of your career mode. Each menu has a set of tasks for you to complete in exchange for cars as rewards. And the rewards in GT7 are very much about car collecting, you player level actually only increases by adding more and more cars to your garage. Carkemon. Sometimes you have to collect a few different cars from specific races. Or other times it will send you to the lisence tests or a multiplayer challenge or any number of other excuses to drive or learn something.
Driving in GT7 feels great. I'm playing on the PS5 controller and the game feels great, haptics on the triggers let you feel the brakes fighting you when you lean on them too hard. The controllers vibration is crazy and the bumps in the road feel really really detailed. I've never been so big into these games that I'd ever get a wheel and pedals set up but the game supports a shitload of different wheel options if you are into that. On top of the controller the biggest benefit of the Ps5 version is that there are no loading screens, which has done wonders for me failing a test over and over again for that sweet sweet gold. When I played GT Sport even on the Ps5 it loaded for-fucking-ever and it sucked. GT7 is optimised and that's not a problem, every screen, every race, every retry, loads immediately.
That biggest flaw of the game right now is that the UI kind of sucks. It's not very intuitive and navigating it will take a lot of getting used to. Thankfully the loading is fast because the number of times I've back out or clicked the wrong thing is extremely high and if I had to sit through loading on top of that I would kill myself.
I did buy the digital deluxe edition which came with a couple of extra's that you wont get normally. First of all I got to special cars that you can't use until you get in the higher end of the game because they are like special Porches and I believe a custom Audi. It also came with 1.5million credits which just appear in your starting money, which leads me to probably the biggest bug bear in the game. Microtransactions.
Yeah you can buy credits in GT7, however I think these microtransactions are pretty minor all things considered. You see GT7 is a very slow game, one only has to look at the achievements to see that they expect you to play this game in chunks over quite a long period of time. For example there is a trophy for driving a fucking shitload of miles in online races a feat alone that could take 100s of hours, and many many many races. Over time you would naturally build up a sizable pool of credits in order to buy cars as you play. And these microtransactions seem to be in place for those who just want to spend to fast track it.
Frankly the game is pretty damn generous of giving you credits. I've made 75K in just a couple of races which is 1/3rd of the way to buying a Ferrari at 350credits. It doesn't take much to get the cars you want, and I can't really see anyone who really wants to play the game ever bothering to buy credits because of this. For further example my 1.5 million credits bought me a two Lamborgini's and a Nissan GTR. One of my Lambo's is a collectors item Diablo which fetches a much higher price in the used car market.
Oh the used car market is fucking sick. Basically it acts like a fake Craig's List for used cars that you can buy at varying prices. Of course all these cars can be bought new (except a few rare exceptions) but the used car market is a way where RNG could bless you with a cool car for much much cheaper than buying it new allowing you to get more cars for less money.Additionally however there are a few "collectors" cars like my Diablo that are only available on the used car market and only rarely. That is one of the reasons why I bought the Diablo, it was there, i had the money, and it's decently rare to pop on the market at all so why not just grab it while I could.
Sadly I can't drive my cool cars because I have to pass the dreaded licenses first. But my adult driving career has prepared me for these in ways my 12 year old self could never know. And while getting gold on some of these tests requires tight play, passing them isn't very hard at all. Though I've heard of a few tests in the Super GT license board that will make you rip your fingernails out. So not looking forward to that.
GT7 paces you out pretty smoothly. You'll learn to drive slower easier cars on easier tracks as you gradually unlock and earn better and better cars. I can't wait to work my way higher.
GT7 strikes a nice balance between casual sim fans and hardcore fans. There are really deep car customization options and driving options to make GT7 really hardcore if you want. But it also lets you dial all that shit back or even turn it off and just go for some rides and it doesn't punish you one way or the other. This is a great driving game plain and simple.
