Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

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Gran Turismo 5 Review

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[Flawless]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

Eurogamer Review - 9

Here are those famous Polyphony graphics, which have somehow kept an unmistakeable house style – a hard, pristine CG look to the cars against grainier, more photographic backdrops – through the generational leaps. They're not perfect. Shadows jitter and crawl, frames drop below 60 per second at busy times, the screen tears, and from some angles at some times the game can look quite plain.

At other angles and times, it's astonishingly real and beautiful, even while it pushes 12 fanatically detailed cars around a busy environment bathed in time-of-day and weather effects that lend an atmosphere so precise and identifiable to the real world, it's eerie. Suzuka's suffused in that fine, mist-like Japanese rain; dusk in Tuscany has a perfect, mellow half-light; Route 5's night-time cityscape surprises with an orchard of cherry trees hung, gratuitously, with fairy lights. It is a spectacle all right, but a spectacle you knew you were getting.

GT5 doesn't control that well on a pad, then, but plug a good force-feedback steering wheel into your PS3 and the game is transformed. This is undoubtedly the best way to experience the phenomenal physical handling model. It doesn't have Forza 3's delicious pliability, but Forza 3 doesn't have its tremendous bite, or its amazing communication of the weight and attitude of your vehicle and the bumps and camber of the road. The range of difficulty settings isn't as wide as others, but you don't need GT5's handling to come to you – you will go to it.

Let's deal with those two old bug-bears next: damage and AI. There is cosmetic deformation of the car models from the biggest impacts, but it's very unconvincing, as if the coachwork was made out of plasticine. You sense Polyphony's heart really isn't in the task of smashing up its beautiful babies.

Worse, the impact physics still have the racers either bouncing off or snagging on each other like toy cars. It's about the audio as much as anything – that hollow thud sounds like you've kicked a cardboard box, not crashed two tons of metal together – but it unsuspends your disbelief at the game's looks in a hurry.

The drivers' AI is much improved, however, with the processional drones of old replaced with conservative but canny pilots who will visibly race each other, make moves to overtake instead of driving blindly into you, and even occasionally run wide or deep into a corner, leaving a tempting opening.

Gran Turismo has a reputation for sterility which it really doesn't deserve. If you know cars and know where to look, there's passion and fantasy and even humour here. And most significantly, there's variety.

This is where GT5 trumps both its predecessors and its rivals. You see, the heart of the game has moved. It's no longer in the GT Mode, despite its improved pace, nor the tuning screen or parts shop. It's certainly not in the vestigial licence tests which are still there but no longer serve much purpose, Polyphony finally having given in and implemented a simple, sensible levelling system to unlock cars and events instead. The game's heart is in those Special Events.

Here you can take part in a wonderfully disparate suite of driving challenges: the rallies (on dirt and snow as well as tarmac), very realistic karting, learning the principles of NASCAR racing with its shuddering 200mph stock cars, racing VW camper vans round the Top Gear test track, piecing the Nürburgring together in section-by-section time trials, and the opulent Grand Tour with its terrifying Tuscan night race in a Lamborghini Murcielago.

It's a more impressive achievement than 1000 cars; this one section of GT5 communicates the spirit of motor racing in all its forms better than any other game. The events are testing but well balanced, and they reward you handsomely with experience and money, which in turn means that GT Mode's grind is greatly alleviated until the later stages.

The game's lack of a car classification system (less of an issue in the offline GT Mode than it used to be) means an unruly free-for-all that will soon stamp out the use of anything other than thousand-horse monsters. There's no persistence or reward for participating in multiplayer: no experience, no money, no ranking, not even points carried over consecutive races.

Half-formed multiplayer is easily the most damaging symptom of Gran Turismo 5's long gestation in Kazunori Yamauchi's parallel universe, and thankfully it's one that can be fixed.

More Reviews:

Destructoid - 10
GamePro - 4.5/5
CVG - 8.0
Joystiq - 4/5
Gamereactor - 7
NowGamer: 10 ways it wins
NowGamer: 10 ways it fails

[Flamehead]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

While generally positive, reviews are all over the place. But it seems like the one constant I'm hearing is that GT5 is still more about the experience of driving these cars, than it is racing them--and that it's the same GT of the past, albeit more polished and refined.

[49ersfan4life85]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

Lamo at IGN blows chunky balls at MC and hates Sony. This game deserves 10/10 . I'll get my copy today !

[Skyboxer]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

Lamo at IGN blows chunky balls at MC and hates Sony. This game deserves 10/10 . I'll get my copy today !

You don't have the game yet it deserves a 10/10.
Pot meet kettle....

Also I'd love to have a 1.00 evertime someone says IGN loves Sony and hates MS or IGN loves MS and hates Sony....

[stagnant]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

I'm not a huge GT fan but I tend to geek out over awesome graphics and I'll be getting the game this afternoon. I bought GT5 Prologue a few months ago and I also took away from the game that noticing the difference between the cars and learning how to control them on the tracks is almost more important than the racing.

[Blzer]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

I am very glad of a well-known reviewing site to completely ignore the time it took for this game to have come out. Not only should that not be a factor in the scoring whatsoever, but it should not even be regarded at all. This is a video game, like all video games, which happened to come out. The time that they take on it is their business, not the reviewer's.

[Hooe]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

Gran Turismo 5 is a 10/10 simulator wrapped up in a 5/10 game

Yet it scores a 9.0 in the gameplay department... ultimately, GT5 is a video game, shouldn't it be evaluated as such?

Once more it's a lifeless grind through a series of races where it's more often than not simply a case of having the right machinery beneath you rather than a test of any real driving skill

Again, this game gets a 9.0 gameplay score?

GT5 doesn't control that well on a pad

Regardless of how well it controls with a steering wheel, how many people are really going to buy one just for GT5? I'd guess that a good number, probably the majority of people who play any racing game on a console, play with the controller.

I don't have a PS3 so I really don't care how good or bad GT5 may be, but my main problem is with these reviews, which strike me as inconsistent.

[Flawless]

Re: Gran Turismo 5 Review - IGN

I've been noticing the inconsistency with reviews for all games lately. It's not surprising to see it's the same for GT5, especially with reviewers having 2 days and things like damage, smarter/more aggressive AI being locked away until you reach a certain level, and online going up the day before.

but I tend to geek out over awesome graphics

It's to bad then that GT5 is an incredibly uneven game visually. It's no stunner like the PS2 games were, but still impressive when you factor in 12-16 cars, great driving physics, day/night transitions, 60fps (mostly), and 1280x1080 resolution.