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 "Gran Turismo 5." (HO) |
Gran Turismo 5
PlayStation 3
Polyphony Digital/Sony Computer Entertainment
Rating: Everyone
Score: 4 out of 5
Think about how much you love your parents, your siblings or your spouse. Now imagine you could feel that depth of love, that level of unwavering commitment and sacrifice, for an inanimate object. Because that is how much the creators of Gran Turismo 5 love cars.
They don't just like cars. They don't just appreciate cars. They abso-freaking-lutely love cars. They obsess over cars. To turn it back around, their devotion to cars would be kind of creepy if it was instead aimed at a human being they weren't related to or sleeping with.
So here's the thing about the latest entry in the long-running, PlayStation-exclusive Gran Turismo racing game series: In order to love this game, you need to be as infatuated with automobiles as series director Kazunori Yamauchi and his team at Tokyo-based Polyphony Digital are.
Or, barring that, you need to at least be a devoted fan of the previous games in the series.
If that's you, you will love Gran Turismo 5. In fact, this review is almost pointless, because you've no doubt already bought the game. But if that's not you -- or if Gran Turismo's absence from the gaming scene for the past five years has caused you to forget what this driving simulator is all about -- you won't love GT5. You'll like it, you'll have some fun with it, but honestly, it's not meant for you.
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As with the previous instalments in the series, Gran Turismo 5 is a meticulously crafted driving game that painstakingly simulates the design, statistics and performance of more than 1,000 real-world vehicles, ranging from subcompacts that you might have parked in your own garage to exotic super-cars that you probably didn't know existed.
You can participate in challenges to get different degrees of your Gran Turismo driver's licence, race in an exhaustive series of events covering all manner of car classes, train a team of A.I. racers, tune and tweak your rides, buy and collect a staggering number of cars, compete with your buddies online and participate in special one-off events, such as a NASCAR driving school or a surprisingly challenging race among a dozen 1962 Volkswagen buses.
I recognize that Gran Turismo 5 is a technical masterpiece. It is slick, polished, deep and loaded with insane amounts of content that will keep players involved and invested for many months. But at times it feels more like an interactive automotive encyclopedia than an actual game.
Gran Turismo 5 offers significantly greater depth and variety than previous games in the series, to be sure, but at the risk of sounding heretical, I've never really understood the point of driving simulation video games in the first place. The cars are accurate down to the last detail, and yet there is no true sense of speed, of motion, of g-forces or even of really driving an actual car when you're sitting on your couch twiddling a pair of thumbsticks.
Gran Turismo 5 is exactly what you'd expect from the latest game in this series, and it will please fans of the genre to no end.
But if you're not already in love with these types of games, Gran Turismo 5 won't do anything to win your heart.
Bottom Line
Polished to a blinding shine, GT5 is a technical masterpiece, yet it feels almost clinically sterile. Fans will love it, but newcomers may wonder what all the fuss is about.