Gran Turismo 5
After five years and eight months, Gamereactor's racing oracle Petter Hegevall has played and set a grade on Gran Turismo 5. Game of the year or a disappointment? Read our long review to find the answer!
What a wait it's been.
Five years and eight months have passed since the racing-crazy head-honcho of Polyphony, Kazunori Yamauchi, stood center stage during Sony's PS3 press conference in Los Angeles and talked about the most ambitious entry into the Gran Turismo series ever. But time went on. Gran Turismo HD became a demo; grey, pale, boring, despite its beautiful graphics. One year went by and we got Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. A handful of cars and a few levels for a cheap price, and it felt much better than Gran Turismo HD. It felt worth the money, and polished.
Gran Turismo 5 was supposed to be released a few months later - this time last year in fact. But time went by. No Gran Turismo 5. Until now.
While I wasn't a huge fan of Gran Turismo 4, since I thought there was a huge difference between Yamauchi's ambitious vision and the end result, my expectations for Gran Turismo 5 were still high. After more than 30 hours with it, I'm disappointed. This is not a bad game, but at the same time not nearly as good as I would have hoped.
When Gran Turismo 5 is good, it's fantastic. It shines like a carefully polished diamond with fantastic graphics and balanced car physics. When Gran Turismo 5 is bad, it's really bad. Sloppy graphics, stuttering frame rate, hopelessly repetitive and a weak presentation. It doesn't take long before it becomes obvious that the development of Polyphony's fifth game in the series hasn't only been expensive, it's also been problematic. The game feels inconsistent, and the general experience fragmented - either way, it's high quality racing as long as you stay away from the worst pitfalls.
It's taken Polyphony more than five years to finish development on Gran Turismo 5. It has cost the developer millions and millions of dollars. Which is a lot of money and time for a game which damage modelling and online modes that still can't compete with racing giants like Forza Motorsport 3 or Need for Speed: Shift. Instead it's the amount of cars and racing cups in the game's career mode that makes up the basis of Gran Turismo 5. This is where Polyphony spent most of its energy. 1031 different cars and more than 60 races is a rather solid foundation to park an overloaded racing car on. And it would have been even more solid if it wasn't for the fact that Polyphony had stressed out some parts while they've shaped others with extreme care.
But to feel that realism, there's a price. You simply can't feel the small improved differences with a standard Dual shock 3 controller. With myself parked in Gamereactor's Fanatec Rennsport-cockpit with a Logitech G27 steering wheel in my hands and with the gas pedal pressed down on the game's Calsonic Nissan GT-R, Gran Turismo 5 is fantastic. The car physics in the Gran Turismo series have always been a bit stiff since the start. It's been too mechanical, too heavy. In Gran Turismo 4 it often felt like you were driving a 12,000 kilo heavy lump of steel and not a 1200 kilo light Japan GT-monster. In Gran Turismo 5, Polyphony have been working hard with the tire physics and how the weight is distributed, which you can really feel. There's another kind of dynamic in how the car tires react when you turn a tight corner. It's more exact than ever before, with an added sense of speed and power. With my chosen car, on my chosen track, and without any stupid droner cars controlled by the game's AI, I throw myself on to the tracks of Laguna Seca, Monza and Suzuka to improve my lap times.
And that's when Gran Turismo 5 truly shines of pure quality. With the G27 everything is changed. That Polyphony this time around simulates the air pressure in the tires and the heat of that air up to 180 times per minute is noticeable. I get a more detailed form of feedback from my steering wheel and I feel faster than ever round Laguna Seca in a Gran Turismo car.
A few hours later put myself into Sebastien Loeb's WRC-car the contrast is almost overwhelming. The mix between the brilliant feel and micro millimeter-precise tire physics to hopelessly slippery make the bad car physics almost feel like a parody at times. The same goes for the Kart-racing, which like the WRC events, should have been taken out. The karts are fast and very responsive, just like in reality, but at the same time they feel more like arcade-karts with their silky smooth stability. And the problems don't end there.
Gran Turismo 5's presentation is more or less worthless. Several different graphical styles are mixed into a huge mess of bad typography and badly designed menus. You have to jump around through the menu system like a madman during the career mode and everything is covered in bad elevator jazz. The menus are meant to mimic some form of exclusive computer program, but it only manages to annoy. Example: the fact that you have to click nine times to pick out and test-drive the cars you win in the game's various races is one of the oddest design choices this year.
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- System:PS3
- Genre:Racing
- Developer:Polyphony Digital
- Publisher:Sony
- Offline players:1-2
- Online players:1-16
- Age limit:From 3 years
- Release date:24 November 2010
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