Gran Turismo Review

Written by: Adam Tewkesbury Posted: 12th October 2009

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Dude, where's my car-eer?

Gran Turismo Details:

	Racing
	PSP
	Polyphony Digital
	Sony

Out Now

Cutting straight to the chase, this most definitely IS Gran Turismo on the PSP - streamlined, inevitably, but ultimately the same core racing experience which first made a name for Polyphony Digital. If that fact alone brings a smile to your face then consider the slightly reduced RRP to be a bargain. More cautious portable gamers would do well to consider the breadth of what is on offer, because whilst the driving experience is pure GT, the game itself has been put together in a fairly unconventional way.

The first impression is of consummate, professional presentation, as has always been the GT way. The opening sequence oozes class, with the PSP cranking out near photo quality images that slither effortlessly across the screen, a relentless torrent of exotic machinery and nicely rendered scenery in which to parade them. This wonderful opener leads to a typically GT menu, and without so much as an enforced training race your career has begun...

Except it hasn’t, because GT Portable doesn’t provide a career, in one of the more baffling design decisions in modern gaming. Gone are the tiered tables, out with events stretching over a set number of events, bye bye class-based cups and restricted entry races- all that is on offer for the single player this time is a sequence of short control challenges (aping the licences of previous games) and a potentially endless stream of customisable single events. For single players, 3 modes are offered; a standard race against up to 3 opponents, time trials with a ghost car, and a drift challenge where stylish powerslides are more important than point to point speed. Multiplayer offers the standard ad-hoc face offs you’d expect, but that is it, and the sparseness of this structure takes a while to soak in- I was looking for the icon to start the proper game for a good while before finally accepting that it didn’t exist.

For a lesser game such a huge omission would likely cause the title to sink into permanent obscurity, but we’re talking about GT here, one of the PlayStation cornerstones, a bedrock in modern gaming and one of the most fondly recalled gaming series of all time. It would be unthinkable that GT could fail completely, and despite initial shock at the apparent lack of structure, the bewildering charm of a ridiculous selection of automotive exotica and plentiful glamorous places to experiment with them remains a heady treat.

Graphics and sound in-game remain impressive, with a rock solid frame rate continuing the sheen of the intro and pushing the PSP hard to produce an experience comparable to PS2 forerunners, whilst control is typically satisfying and varied depending on your chosen mode of transport. The only notable criticism behind the wheel could be levelled at rally stages (a personal favourite in previous games) which feel a bit skittish and too slippery to fit with the realism achieved elsewhere, but these remain entertaining nonetheless. On tarmac GT really shines, with cars exhibiting momentum and weight distribution which makes threading them around the more convoluted tracks both a challenge and a pleasure. As your confidence as a driver increases the more mundane vehicles start to feel slow and sluggish, but winning races fills your bank balance and, as always, the lure of faster cars quickly tempts you to test you skills in more outlandish and overpowered technology. Driving aids (including a racing line indicator which tells you when to start braking) can make things a bit easy, but turn this off and ease the difficulty up and it is quickly possible to recreate the tense racing face-offs of previous games.

There are further design issues, however. GT practically wrote the book on having a huge selection of cars from international manufacturers, however someone thought it would be a good idea to limit choice in portable GT to 4 garages at a time, which cycle on an in-game daily basis. This decision is infuriating, as you’re often inevitably a few quid short of the car you really want, and going out on an event to earn the extra cash can mean that the automotive object of your affection has gone by the time you get back to the garage, resulting in a wait until the garage and model is randomly available again. Options to add bits and bobs to your existing garage have been severely truncated too- there are options to play with your car set-up, but the extensive customisation options of past games have sadly been sacrificed. This is all the more confusing when the game structure is now totally reliant on the hook of making money to spend on cars- when all other motivation has been removed, surely the opportunities to spend cash should be many and varied, not unnecessarily complicated and frustrating?

The overall impression can be that of a glorified demo more than a full game, which is so much more disappointing when the actual act of driving around the track is such a success. It’s as if Polyphony spent so much time and effort fitting a physics model onto the UMD, there wasn’t enough budget or processing power left to construct an actual game around the parts they’d finished. The only motivation for continued play is the need to make money and buy more cars, but this is annoying in itself due to the unwelcome choice to restrict your buying options at any one time. And despite all of this criticism, the game still manages to impress, which is possibly the most frustrating thing of all- if the structure of GT’s past was here too we’d undoubtedly be looking at the definitive portable racing experience, making the many shortcomings all the more irksome when it is so easy to see what could have been. Whilst fans of previous series entries will doubtless drag plenty of enjoyment from having such a revered title in portable form, players less influenced by rose tinted memories of GT’s past may find it harder to forgive the limitations of the game structure and the similarly limited reasons to progress.