For Polyphony, it's all about the detail. Take one of Gran Turismo 5's premium cars to a night-time Kyoto in the Photo Travel Mode and you'll see where those six years since the last installment proper have gone; they're in the light refracting across the headlights, in the reflections that glisten across the perfectly sculpted bodywork and in the rivets and nuts that are each perfectly placed and painstakingly rendered. Forget photo-realism; catch it from the right angle and Gran Turismo 5 looks better than the real thing.
Get behind the wheel and that same attention to detail shines just as brightly, earning Gran Turismo 5 its billing as 'The Real Driving Simulator' and then some. Forza Motorsport 3's strength lay in its cornering as you struggle against its tire deformation system and Need for Speed Shift is about the experience at the redline as you hit maximum velocity. Gran Turismo's genius is in its braking zones. It's here that GT5's fantastic physics show their worth.
That's violently clear from the first moment you go under the hood and flesh out the Nissan Silvia, Toyota Corolla or whatever other vanilla Japanese car you choose as your first ride. Hit the anchors and it's likely to fishtail widely as it struggles to lose the kind of speed that the car was never designed for, leaving you flailing into the corner and thinking to yourself that the supercharger you just strapped on may well have been a step too far.
Move up the power band and the challenge will rise in tandem; stopping a vintage Dodge Challenger for Monza's first chicane can prove a herculean task, and Gran Turismo adds some little flourishes to bring that home. The screen judders as the weight of the car shifts forward and the tires begin to skim along the tarmac like a well-thrown pebble across a pond, making it a challenge in itself just to spot the turn-in point and apex. Get into the corner and the physics won't let up, and by threading the V8's power through too eagerly you can feel the chassis protesting that you're pushing it that little bit too far.
Introduce a few of Gran Turismo 5's new features and then it gets really interesting. Take a race-spec Toyota Castrol Toms Supra 97 around a rain-slicked Le Mans and it's like nothing you've ever seen as you rip down the Mulsanne head-first into a wall of spray, the lone windscreen wiper whipping fruitlessly across the slim window of your faultlessly modelled cockpit.
Night-racing at Le Mans - it doesn't get much better than this.
All wonderfully accurate, and for those who like wrestling with untamed machinery impossibly exhilarating. But others may understandably find it all a little daunting. Thankfully Polyphony has had the foresight to open up its superlative handling model to all-comers, and Gran Turismo 5 is more approachable than its predecessors thanks to some all-new assists that can make hurling around a pedigree GT car as carefree as driving one of the all-new karts.
With its handling model proudly restoring Gran Turismo upon the driving throne, it's now easier than ever to fall in love with its exhaustive garage - and this time out there's a lot to fall for. From the nimble karts with their willingness to be hurled around to the brace of contemporary WRC cars that simply demand to be thrown about, it's a list that's as long as it is lust-worthy. But as ever it's just as easy to develop an unlikely love affair with those less than spectacular starting steeds, tuning them to within an inch of their lives until they're near un-drivable beasts.
Customisation options, however, are limited, especially in the wake of Forza 3's more comprehensive efforts. Beneath the skin it's detailed enough with several layers of upgrades that can be applied, (although, strangely, it's no longer possible to upgrade a car's brakes) but beyond that there's little else that can be done; paint jobs are limited to either the body or wheels while bodywork options are few across both the standard and the premium cars.
Within Gran Turismo 5's 1,000 plus garage, there's a clear divide. Some 200 of the cars are given the premium treatment, and these examples are often achingly beautiful, a fact that's heart-stoppingly clear in the game's photo mode. Here it's easy to get carried away, pausing a replay then toying with the shutter speed and aperture, spending more time gawping at the cars than actually driving them.
It's a level of care that hasn't been extended to the standard cars that form the bulk of Gran Turismo 5's car list. While they're far from unattractive, their PlayStation 2 heritage shows, with textures looking flat and comparatively lifeless, and the omission of a cockpit view and a blunted damage model gives them a distinctly second class flavor. Thankfully it's not something that's notable in the heat of a high-speed battle, but when the game does show its standard class cars up close the difference can be jarring; edges are ragged and shadows sit uncomfortably, making them look awkward alongside their more polished brethren.
Damage is unconvincing right now; this is the result of a series of high-speed prangs.
It's part of a visual inconsistency that runs throughout the game. At times, Gran Turismo 5 is genuinely jaw-dropping – indeed, it can be the kind of game that makes you want to drop your controller and grab some random passer-by just to show them what marvels it's capable of. Madrid and Rome's street tracks are, like the returning London track introduced in Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, uncanny recreations of their inspiration, and while Indianapolis and Daytona don't have the same dazzle they're told with a comparable authenticity.
Elsewhere, though, it's a sometimes uninspiring bunch. It's fair enough that the all-new Top Gear test track doesn't tickle the eyeballs – it is, after all, drawn from a featureless aerodrome sat bang in the middle of England's featureless Surrey – but the fictional Cape Ring displays a disappointing failure of imagination on Polyphony's part. It's a labyrinth run through a desperately bland landscape that's only salvaged by its intriguing variety of corners.
It feels like a primer for the nondescript tracks churned out by the Course Maker, which rather than being an editor of any kind would more amply be described as a track generator. There's little control to the Course Maker's output beyond a set of seemingly arbitrary parameters, and anyone hoping to recreate their favourite stretch of tarmac will likely be left feeling deflated. Still, it's a novel way to extend a track list which is already generous, even if the results are largely dull and lifeless.
Gran Turismo 5's frontend is equally uninspired, though it's enlivened by the typical Japanese eccentricity lent by a sprinkling of light jazz piano. An epic 8GB install slims down the bloated loading screens (opt out of this and – quite smartly – the game will install content as you play through it) though they still outstay their welcome, while menus are over elaborate and ill-designed. That's not too much of a problem in the single player offering but it's something that does its best at obscuring an otherwise solid online offering.
Racing online, once you get to it, is perfectly stable, handling up to sixteen cars with few issues. Options are admittedly limited with no way to deviate from straight-up racing, but when the handling's as good as Gran Turismo 5's it's hard to find complaint. It also has room for a few quirks of its own - there's an option to allow false starts, which can lend those first moments on the grid a unique tension, while a player wall that can host updates of up to 140 characters shows that Polyphony has at least one eye on wider online social developments.
There are other positives too. Separate online rooms can be created, allowing you to mine deep and set up different experiences from a 30 lap race around Le Mans with no assists to a simple two-lap blast around the Autumn Ring. It's sad, then, that it's all wrapped up in a muddled menu system that utilises a code system that's archaic and far from user-friendly, displaying an ignorance of recent developments throughout the racing genre.
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And that's an accusation that can sadly be levelled squarely at Gran Turismo 5's overall single-player offering. Once more it's a lifeless grind through a series of races where it's more often than not simply a case of having the right machinery beneath you rather than a test of any real driving skill. It's enlivened by some special events where the dead-eyed likenesses of NASCAR's Jeff Gordon and the voice of WRC star Sebastien Loeb will guide you through their respective disciplines, but ultimately it's a shame that Polyphony didn't take the opportunity to revise a formula that was already feeling stale six years ago.
The fleshing out of B-Spec adds little. Here you're not behind the wheel but watching from afar, handing out instructions to one of a team of A.I drivers you can develop over time. It's all about maintaining pace and in turn maintaining the driver's physical and mental stamina, but with no option to speed up time it's your own stamina that's likely to go first.
At least the races, which utilize Gran Turismo's typically brilliant replay facilities alongside a generous ream of telemetry, are pretty to look at, and the A.I is itself convincing. Unfortunately the same can't be said when it's yourself in charge, and A-Spec's races aren't helped by the return of the series' now trademark zombie A.I. Any tweaks that have been made are hard to decipher as by and large your fellow racers will pay little attention to your on-track maneuvers, often braking at inexplicable moments and turning what should be a high-octane contest into a comic bout of very expensive bumper cars.
Photo mode shows the cars in all their perfectly rendered glory.
And like bumper cars they're likely to bounce off each other with little consequence. The inclusion of damage is so slight as to be insignificant, and even the most violent of crashes will only result in a polygon shifting slightly ajar. There's an unconvincing lack of weight to the big on-track collisions, and as before in Gran Turismo games it does much to break the immersion its handling model does so well to establish. A shame, as drive into a wall hard and long enough (though you'll have to attack it with the ferocity and persistence of a dog on heat) and the damage model will slowly begin to expose itself – something it will more readily do, we hope, after a future patch.
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