Review

Gran Turismo has never been a racing game, it's more about the actual driving experience. Enter any race in the career mode and the A.I. opponents will happily follow the racing line and never attempt to overtake each other,providing more of a mobile chicane than anything approaching competition. 90% of the time you'll have taken first place before the start of lap two. The only person you're really racing against is yourself, if you're after a proper rush of racing then you really should look elsewhere.

I'm pleased to say that Gran Turismo 6 is a return to form for the series, the best since GT3 back in the days of the PS2. Where GT5 felt laboured and boring, GT6 finally has a career mode that feels properly structured with everything clearly laid out and a simple star-based award system for unlocking new events. Previous games in the series have found their early stages hampered by the same circuits appearing over and over but here you'll find a different set of tracks in each section.

The tracks themselves are beautiful as you'd expect and as before the most satisfying ones are those that are unique to Gran Turismo. The likes of Grand Valley Raceway and Trial Mountain are as much fun to drive around here as they have ever been. Of course some excellent real-world circuits are included too such as the ever-present Laguna Seca, Silverstone and the fantastic Spa but these offer thrills you can get from any other racing game as well. The inclusion of the Goodwood Festival of Speed is a very welcome distraction from the career mode and lets you try out some of the faster cars earlier than you would get to them normally.

A curious decision is the one that keeps online racing locked until you've completed a couple of hours in career mode. It turns out that this is actually inspired as the only cars available to you are the ones in your own garage and nobody wants to be driving a Demio in online events. Obviously this is where the ability to buy in-game credits with real money comes into play, essentially allowing some players to just buy better cars, but I found progression through regular play to be just as quick as it has even been. Especially as the game rewards you with bonus credits if you come back an play on a daily basis. Although micro-transactions are a controversial inclusion, I never once felt like I needed to spend extra.

Of course, no Gran Turismo review would be complete without some mention of the visuals, and as you'd expect this is a truly spectacular feast for the eyes. It may have lost some of the “wow” factor that earlier games in the series enjoyed but the night races in particular can still impress and every car now has an painstakingly created interior view. It all adds up to what is easily the best looking driving game on PS3 and moves at a locked 60fps at all times. It even gives Forza 5 a run for its money!

Not everything is great though. Go-karts are once again an unwanted distraction, but seeing as you can ignore them that's not too much of a problem. Then there's the licence tests. These may have been more successfully integrated into the career mode but achieving Gold medals on them is now stupidly easy and I managed to do the majority of them on my first attempt. In the past we have wasted hours (days even) in the pursuit of Gold medals but GT6 denies us this challenge. There's also a Moon buggy challenge which is just completely random and out of place that is reminds you how the GT series was once too self-indulgent.

Gran Turismo 6 is everything you would want from the series. It captures perfectly the relationship between man and machine and lets you get on with the business of driving. Like I said at the beginning, it doesn't get the adrenaline pumping like GRID 2 or my personal favourite: Need For Speed: Shift, but sometimes you just want to relax and drive and for that, there's no better game out there.

About the Review

Platform

Sony Playstation 3

Developer

Polyphony Digital

Publisher

Sony Computer Entertainment

Released

6th December 2013