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Gran Turismo 5 is a great video game. It captures the essence and fun of driving, but, there are a few things that annoy me. This game took a whopping 5 years to come out and the producer of the game said he may have put too much detail into the game. Well, detail or not, it’s still a video game and that’s what I’m going to review it as.
1. Grinding
The most fun part of the game is collecting the 1000+ cars, trying them out, racing with them, and trying to get the best lap times for each car. This is, and always has been, fun. But the in between parts, how you get the money to buy the cars, is what is lacking. Many times because of the lack of funds to buy new cars, I found myself racing the same races with the same car just to get money to buy another car to race a specific race with that car and do the same thing over and over and over. It gets repetitive kind of quickly.
They’ve added this whole leveling up system in which you have to gain experience points and level up to actually race certain races. So not only do you have to have certain specific cars for races, you also have to be a certain level in order to actually be in that race. So now, you’re not ony grinding for cash, you’re also grinding for experience points.
A new thing in this version of Gran Turismo is parts upgrading. You can upgrade the parts on any car you get. The parts you can upgrade include the engine, adding turbos, suspension system, intake system, transmission, and others. It’s pretty fun to upgrade your car and see how it changes, but the whole upgrading parts system actually has an issue. You save up your money to buy a car for a certain race, for example I saved up and bought a Corvette Stingray for a classic muscle car challenge in the game. I do the race and find out I’m barely keeping 6th place and I could never even get to 1st! So what do I have to do? Upgrade the car. So pretty much a lot of the times when you get a new car, it’s just not enough. You have to spend an extra 20-100,000 in upgrading parts just to win races! More grinding!
2. Computer AI
One annoying thing about the game is the computer AI. They haven’t made them smarter or more agrressive or anything, but it seems like they made them assholes. Lots of times in races they’ll hudle together and block my path so that I ram into the back side of the cars, then a car doesn’t move so I drive behind the car touching it all along the way until a turn comes up, the computer moves, and I crash into a wall.
Another thing that the computer does which I get increidbly annoyed is this: You play the whole race in 1st place, and then on the last lap, in the last couple of corners, the computer AI comes up behind you and shoves you into a spin by tapping you on the side of your car, then, all the racers pass you so that you end up in 12th place. It took you 10 mins. to do that whole race and right at the end the AI just wrecks it for you, forcing you to replay the whole 10 min. race again. This isn’t just some freak occurence or anything, this has happened quite a number of times since I’ve been playing the game.
3. No fast forward? Or rewind? Wtf?
B-spec makes a return from GT4 where you command an AI from the sidelines. I would describe it as pokemon for cars. This is all fine and dandy, but how they executed it was dumb. You play the same exact races as in A-spec except they add laps to those races. So if an A-spec race was 3 laps, they make the B-spec race 5 laps, etc. And, they took out the fast forward feature, which means you have to sit there and watch the AI play the whole race! It gets really really boring really really quickly.
They removed the rewind and fast forward feature in replays. This is absolutely dumb and I hope they patch it in because.. it’s stupid. You want to watch a certain point in the race but you can’t, you have to sit and watch the whole race up until that point and then closely watch it because if you miss something, you can’t rewind it. Dumb.
I don’t know. Maybe I missed the controls for it or something? They couldn’t have left fast forward and rewind out could they? If anyone has any info on this please comment below and let me know!
4. Load times.
Load times are really long. Do yourself a favor and do the 10gb install ASAP. Yeah, it takes 40 minutes, but it seriously helps load times so much that it’s worth the wait.
5. Driving is fun.
The driving is fantastic. Every car feels different, and there are so many cars to choose from. I seriously want to buy and try out all the cars in the game just to find one I really love. The tracks are great and look beautiful. The major component of the game, driving, is the most awesome part of the game. They did an excellent job and I love the driving so much. I’m a huge car nut and it’s amazing to play and read about the cars and to try out different things.
6. Photo mode is awesome.
There’s a cool photo mode where you can take premeium cars and set them to cool backgrounds and take awesome looking photos. They give you options like you’re using a DSLR camera and you can change f, ISO, zoom, and lots of other things. Then you can save the image to your XMB and put it on a usb flash drive and show it to your friends. It’s pretty fun and cool.
And photo mode isn’t just for premium cars actually. During any replay you can go into photo mode and take a picture. That is an excellent feature, and personally I loved using photo mode in Tourist Trophy, another racing video game from Polyphony Digital that was about motorcycles.
Here’s a photo I took of one of my favorite cars, the Skyline GTR-32. It’s pretty realistic looking.
Image may be NSFW.
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7. No drift special event?
Why didn’t they make a drifting special event for the game? We have fricking boring Nascar, but there’s no event to teach us how to drift? They could’ve gotten Keiichi Tsuchiya to host it or someone cool like that. It would’ve been an awesome special event in the game.
Conclusion
I just feel that they could’ve done better with this game. It feels a lot like Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, but with more cars, tracks, and event types. The Special Events are cool, and the driving is amazing, but the grinding and lack of video gameness is really peculiar. I don’t know if anyone other than people who are really into cars could appreciate the game, and I wonder if video gamers who are into cars will find the game part of Gran Turismo 5 lacking or not.
I like the game, but there are some pretty big annoyances. I only got the game 4 days ago and I’m already getting bored of it. 6/10