Gran Turismo 7

You buy an expensive cinema ticket, you sit down, and some guy sits himself down in the seat in front, wearing a stovepipe hat. You ask him politely if he wouldn't mind taking it off, but he refuses to do so unless you give him £16.99.

"Sir," you say, "unless you desist, I shall be obliged to call the manager."

"Sir," he repies, "I _am_ the manager."

It is difficult to imagine what Sony would have to do to recover the goodwill they've burned on this one. It really is that bad. It's in the category of the way you feel about Microsoft before you switch to Linux or MacOS, the way you feel about Autodesk before you switch to Blender, the way you feel about Unity before you switch to Godot Engine. I don't care if they're the only cinema in town showing They Finally Made a 2020s Movie A Person Might Conceivably Want to See. I'll give it a miss, cos at the time of writing this operation ain't gonna see a further red cent out of me.

Some cars are realisticly priced, with reasonable payouts for races - but most cars are unobtainable due to the insane pricing: I've seen up to 20 million credits (before modifications), against an average prize of under 100,000 credits for a race - that's 200 races (all wins and all 5 or 10 laps) for 1 car. Why is the pricing so bad? Microtransactions. At the time of writing, 2 million credits is £16, making 1 car a poultry £160. That means that the microtransactions aren't even micro - who is going to pay that in a game that you've had to pay to own? Everything about the sales sceme boggles my mind.

It's such a shame as the racing is good, and the modification system is interesting. Because there is so much focus on needing different cars you start to pay more attention to the unobtainable pricing than the racing and it absolutely ruins what could be a good game. I've tried grinding it out and got bored several times.

Ill start with the positives: the graohics are super clean, the cars look amazing, the teacks that have elevation like Laguna Seca actually have elevation for the first time in a racing game

But

You need to be online to race single player against the AI, to do your licenses or circuit experiences.this is pointless. In reality i play Gran Turismo when the newtork is down and i can play my normal games with mates . Same for split screen multiplayer. Needs to be online!? But nore o multiplayer - i loved the assist options in gt sport thst would allow my kids to rsce me, slowly turning them off 1 by 1 until they get the hang of things. No such optons in this ga.e.kind of an ow goal for the devs too as getting them into racong sims will benefit them in the long run

My final gripes are how hard it is to earn credits to buy new cars, its clearly based around micro transactions. And the lack of single player races and modes. I go back to Gt2 with all the races from 2 laps through to 500. I don't want to do a 500lap race but the option was there

If they'd have rebuilt gt sports gameplay into this game it would've been a much better result.

This game is so polished and thoroughly following the old style of Gran Turismo. It gives me so much nostalgia having played this series for nearly 20 years. It's so good. Graphics, game mechanics, "story mode" adds up to a great experience complimented by a better than ever music score that combines old tunes with a twist of new music. 9/10 great game. If it gets b spec I'll rate it 10/10, I miss that mode...

The series peaked with GT4. U fortunately the relay value on GT7 is very low. There's no way to sell cars, which was a huge part of previous games, and it basically just hands you cars for winning races.

You always start at the very back of all races so they're not actual races, rather games of catch-up. Graphically it's gorgeous, but there's more to games than just how they look. I hope they fix a LOT of these issues as the updates come out.

EDIT: They just reduced payouts for races to push microtransactions. Absolutely horrible from the bottom up.