From the first honk of the series’ iconic countdown klaxon, there are moments during Gran Turismo 7 when it feels almost like a remake of the 1997 original. In the space of a moment I’m 16 again and stuffing earthshaking turbos into a bright red Mitsubishi GTO, wondering how I’m going to be able to beat my dad around Trial Mountain when he always gets the DualShock and I have to make do with our only other controller – a terrible, translucent blue aftermarket job with no analogue sticks. That’s a kind of magic a video game series can’t buy; it can only earn. Gran Turismo 7 has that magic; that compulsive car upgrade loop the series established, plus the hot looks and sterling handling to back it up. But there’s a lot more to Gran Turismo 7 than the sum of its nostalgia – even if there are still a few traditions it should’ve left in its rear-view mirror.
Nostalgia isn’t a requirement, though: Gran Turismo 7 is the most welcoming GT ever, with dozens of hours of curated races and tasks designed to induct a new generation of players into the classic GT experience. GT7 achieves this via the Gran Turismo Café, an eccentric but effective little hub that the developers at Polyphony have placed right in the middle of its world map. When we drop in, the café owner assigns us specific races and tasks via a series of 39 so-called “menu books.” Working through those gradually introduces new drivers to how things work in GT – from earning licences and finding and buying cars, to customisation and racing. Some of it may initially seem like busywork to long-time GT players, but the racing events the Gran Turismo Café deliberately threads us through all make up part of the large list of career races we’d be otherwise doing anyhow – and the decent collection of reward cars offered for working through the menu books makes it well worth your time.
You’ll definitely be able to win many more cars this way than you’d be able to afford to buy in your first week with GT7, that much is clear. Payouts aren’t particularly extravagant and car upgrade costs can be surprisingly high for some items, like tyres that cost twice as much as an entire MX-5, or $100,000 nitrous systems no amount of boosted DVD players would ever pay for. Even neat ideas, like the huge range of official manufacturer paint colours we can use in the design booth, annoyingly come with a cost attached.
Nevertheless, collecting each themed trio of cars for the GT Café’s menu books (like European classic compacts, or retro Japanese sports icons) also unlocks a sweetly earnest short video that showcases the cars and explains their relevance to automotive culture. These vignettes are clearly aimed at people with a more limited background in motoring history than I have but I still admire Polyphony’s efforts to try and add context to why certain cars are here. That said, while some of these collections are very historically robust and can properly chart the lineage of certain iconic models, some others are hamstrung by GT7’s limited pool of cars to pull from. For instance, GT7’s Supra and GT-R collections are great examples of menu books that span decades of motoring evolution, but others have to take a bit more of a grab-bag approach. GT7’s car roster exceeding 400 sounds good on paper (and it surpasses the nearly 350 that 2017’s GT Sport ended up with after several years of updates) but accounting for multiple variations of the fantasy Vision GT cars, the race car versions of road cars, and then the reverse “road car” versions of some of those race cars, that 400 figure shrinks a bit. It’s really only around half the cars available in Forza Motorsport 7, the crosstown rival racer it originally inspired.
The reality is the garage in GT7 is not nearly as rich as you may expect – and certainly not as current. With a few exceptions, most manufacturers’ ranges tend to top out at around 2017. If you’re expecting to see quite a few high-profile cars from the last two or three years here, like the latest McLarens or any Tesla built since 2012, you may be disappointed.
Handle with Flair
Crucially, however, the car handling is quite impeccable – and virtually every single car I’ve driven feels appreciably different from the last. Retro road cars feel lairy and loose, and they can become wilder still with some extra oomph squeezed under the bonnet as proper performance tuning returns to the series after its absence from GT Sport. Modern sports cars feel a bit more planted but they’re nothing like the dedicated race models, which are stiff and cling to the tarmac like their tyres have talons. In what feels like an improvement on GT Sport, grip doesn’t quite disappear off a cliff the moment I overcook a corner exit. I’ve found I’m able to drive out of trouble more often after perching a car in a slide. I have my reservations about the off-road handling – specifically how it deals with jumps – but GT7 is amazing on asphalt.
Like GT Sport before it GT7 seriously sings on a steering wheel (I’m using the Thrustmaster T-GT) but know that it still feels absolutely at home on a DualSense controller, and I haven’t felt like it’s a disadvantage; in fact, I’ve achieved gold cups in the bulk of the license tests using a controller. I have found the weaker of the two countersteering assists useful in some vehicles because it takes some of the dramatic edge off my car’s bulk snapping from side to side – something that can be a little tricky to intuit with only the tiny amount of travel possible on an analogue stick compared to a wheel – but if you require more assists GT7 features plenty of them, all the way up to full auto-braking. GT7 may be a serious racer, but it’s not an entirely inaccessible one.
The PS5 DualSense’s haptic feedback also rates a positive mention. There are times where it feels like it’s trying to deliver a few too many sensations simultaneously to really grasp what each is trying to illustrate – so it’s just a lot of whirring and buzzing, all at once – but the DualSense otherwise copes with GT7 splendidly. The response to curbs is particularly nuanced, and there are some other bits of feedback that are unique to particular tracks that feels very cool – like the whirr from whipping over the metal grates that stretch across the Tokyo expressway circuit. That this buzz feels distinct in my hands from the clunk of a gear change is exactly the type of thing I’m keen to keep seeing done with the DualSense.