“Gran Turismo 7” in the test: Between nostalgia, car love and

“Have a nice day! I’d like an Espresso Lamborghini to go. Oh no, wait a minute, maybe you’d prefer a Latte Toyota?” Who now thinks that after extensive sessions with “Gran Turismo 7” If the spark plugs have finally burned out, you might learn better when you do the first laps in “Gran Turismo 7” or make your first trip to the racing game café. This is the new heart of the “Gran Turismo 7” campaign and also shows a bit that the time-honored racing game series from Polyphony Digital naturally had to be trimmed a bit to modern times and still wanted to retain its old strengths. In the following sections we will tell you whether this was ultimately successful.

“Gran Turismo 7”: Between café lessons and lots of car love

Well, then a detour to the café after all: Basically, the brand new place is on the Gran Turismo 7 world map the central hub and starting point of the campaign, so to speak. In the café, a hipster narrator, who partly reminded me of the usual “explanatory bears” from many Nintendo titles, not only gives you a lot of information about the history of the car, but also a small menu with tasks that your hungry bolide heart should be satisfied: You collect new cars in different competitions, which are usually sorted by country or vehicle type, and after successfully completing your “Quest” menu, you can welcome those cars as part of your fleet. Again and again you trundle back and forth between the world map and different driving competitions, the “Gran Turismo”-typical license sections, a workshop, a used car dealership and a car showroom and then end up back in the café with a certain regularity to pick up new orders for you.

Admittedly, this takes a bit of getting used to at first and sometimes a bit cringy because of this intentional hipsterness, but ultimately it is a charming and clever solution for sensibly dividing and structuring the “Gran Turismo 7” campaign. Ultimately, in the presentation, the historical excerpts and the explanations of the gigantic vehicle history, you can feel a lot of love and nostalgia for the beautiful cars, which of course are the absolute heart of Polyphony Digital in every respect. Of course, there is sometimes a lack of “ease” with which, for example, Playground in the “Forza Horizon 5” series picks up the players and transports them almost directly to the brilliant racing game world, but the design of the “Gran Turismo 7” – I liked the campaign overall because it captures the love and fascination for cars wonderfully and clearly makes you want more.

Gran Turismo 7: Large fleet, great routes and brilliant driving physics

Of course, “Gran Turismo 7” makes you want “more” above all on the numerous virtual slopes that the developers serve us here: The racing action feels very familiar for “Gran Turismo” veterans at lightning speed, which I really appreciate my. No other racing game series has so much recognition value, which is particularly due to the almost perfectly hit driving physics, which has always been the hallmark of the series. Almost everyone, the numerous cars, steers and “feels” different on the track: Thanks to countless tuning options, even minor changes to your favorite vehicle have a visible and noticeable effect on the racetrack. Likewise, of course, different road surfaces in general, etc.

All in all, it is therefore also great fun to “drive” through the 424 vehicle fleet or to park your sweethearts in the virtual garage, to cherish and look after them. The typical gameplay loop, which has already established itself in the past Gran Turismo main offshoots, unfolds its pull this time too. By the way, it also gets a bit nostalgic when choosing the slopes: There are a total of 34 different routes in “Gran Turismo 7”, which make it to a total of 97 variations with different route setups. Of course, veterans can look forward to some favorites from GT history such as “Trial Mountain” or “Deep Forest”, but of course also some newcomers. As one of the last GT videos from Sony PlayStation showed, some of the tracks are modeled 1:1 on the real models, which is of course a special treat for GT fans with an affinity for racing. As one of the few points of criticism we only found the AI ​​behavior, since the different levels of difficulty do not really scale meaningfully and at some point it actually gets a bit frustrating to always have to clean up the field from behind and especially later in the campaign despite a good drive often to lag behind.

The fact that “Gran Turismo 7” drives so fantastically is of course also due to the driving physics, but also to the strong racing feedback, which once again gives us the great DualSense controller use: traction, driving over lane boundaries, etc. are carried out the haptic feedback of the controller is fantastically conveyed and make the racing action really noticeable. The adaptive triggers are also really useful when accelerating and braking. The PlayStation 5 version of the game is almost worth it for that alone, even regardless of the graphical upgrades the console has over the PS4 versions.

Gran Turismo 7: Graphics and presentation with lots of light and few shadows

Graphically, too, Gran Turismo 7 on the PlayStation 5 is definitely impressive, even if unfortunately it didn’t quite reach the status of a graphic highlight, as some GT fans might have wished for. But first things first: On the PlayStation 5 you can choose between a performance mode and a ray tracing mode. The latter is perhaps a bit confusing, since ray tracing is only used in replays, menus, etc., not during the actual racing segments. Replays are capped at 30FPS in RT mode and look really superb thanks to the fantastic vehicle models and use of lights and shadows. In performance mode, on the other hand, a constant 60 FPS per second is aimed for, which is of course desirable for a racing game: Here we can definitely confirm that the game keeps the frame rate mostly stable in native 4K resolution. We only occasionally noticed a few dips in the frame rate on rainy roads and a lot of action on the screen. For the most part, GT7 runs squeaky clean and stable in both modes.

The fantastic vehicle models in particular look great and once again impress with their incredible attention to detail and brilliance. That’s actually not too much of a surprise considering the output from Polyphony Digital, but it’s really hard to get enough of the cars. Just as little as the great weather effects, the detailed interiors of the vehicles and the realistic sky, which looks really great. The routes are indeed realistic, but annoying pop-ins and a general static of the scenery (especially with regard to the spectators* on the edge of the page) are unfortunately among the negative points of the graphic presentation. We were also hoping for a slightly larger graphical jump from GT Sport to GT7, but the cross-gen orientation of the latest Gran Turismo offshoot unfortunately prevents an even more impressive graphical brilliance.

Conclusion on “Gran Turismo 7”

Born to be Great: With “Gran Turismo 7” racing game fans finally get a brand new main offshoot of the legendary PlayStation franchise, which in no way disappoints: “Gran Turismo 7” impresses with its outstanding driving physics, the incredible attention to detail and is essentially a huge love letter to the racing cars that are the focus of the game to stand. The “hipster” nature of the campaign may take some getting used to at first, but it provides a sensible structure for the numerous races and competitions that will keep fans busy for hours and hours. The overall package is excellent overall, even if a few minor weaknesses cloud the excellent overall picture: The AI ​​of the computer competitors is a bit disappointing and doesn’t scale particularly well in the individual difficulty levels. Overall, the presentation is well done, but it still seems a bit dusty and a bit too static at times. Nevertheless, the exciting races and the hunt for the next gold title have completely occupied us again. Anyone who likes simulation-heavy racing games will definitely not be able to avoid Gran Turismo 7!

Also exciting:

“Gran Turismo 7” will be released on March 4th for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

You can get a gameplay impression of the game here:

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