review
What's it all about?Tweet, tweet, tweet...Contact!Australian release dates
                 
                 
     

POSTED 26/11/10


GRAN TURISMO 5

Sony
PS3

Heh. After waiting several years for GT5 to be proven real, we couldn’t help but chuckle when confronted with around 60 minutes of install upon start-up. What’s another hour, right?

So, 8GB later and all's smoother than a Lotus Elise’s bum, yeah? Nup. Prepare ye the way of the load… almost everything sucks time from racing, and more installation occurs along the way. Wow.

Putting aside load-time angst, GT5 delivers on one promise. With around 1,000 cars of varying shapes and vintages, this is a motoring-lover’s wet dream – unadulterated vehicular porn. Attention to detail – down to fonts used on showroom-styled number plates – cannot be questioned. As for attention paid elsewhere, however...

After waiting this long, we don’t feel it unreasonable to expect a GT experience bordering on perfection; it’s just not the case. Sure, there are more tracks, race styles, challenges and even go-karts than you could shake a dipstick at, but what links them together is – surprisingly - sloppy, and despite looking reasonably pretty (but not amazing), the races don’t approximate any feeling of dangerousness. Anybody who’s experienced a real track day will know that exhilaration, for if you fuck a corner up, you could kinda die.

How sloppy? We remapped the controls, but had to restart our PS3 before they were recognised... The learning curve earning licences is as wayward as Lazy Line Painter Jane on the turps… In-car view’s only available for some cars… Sound FX = lame... Menus are a mess... Music's usually ridiculously inappropriate… We excitedly unlocked the Top Gear test track for (drum roll) a VW Kombi race about as speedy as our Mum! S-l-o-p-p-y!

GT5 demands points for sheer audaciousness of scale, but needed more attention to stuff that matters – rather than getting the aerial looking just right on that MINI.

take me back to the start...

 



CLICK THIS!



CLICK THIS!



 

 

     
                 
                 
     
ALL WRITTEN CONTENT COPYRIGHT © AMY FLOWER 2008-2018. GAME IMAGES COURTESY OF RESPECTIVE GAMES COMPANIES.