I’m not a huge fan of Gran Turismo as a game series and especially not Gran Turismo 7 which I see in every conceivable way as one step forward, two steps back from the surprisingly entertaining Gran Turismo Sport. Gran Turismo 7 feels too old fashioned for my taste. It contains way too much gate, I hate that stiff, dry old man’s cafe and the whole thing about presenting cars and motorsport as if they were holy scriptures in a 19th century library doesn’t work very well for me. I look for something else when I spend time inside a virtual car, today. Something more racing-scented, something more solid with more focus on real motorsport and of course I have no desire whatsoever to pay 400 kroner to unlock a car in a game I already paid 800 kroner for.
That said, Polyphony has continued to polish the driving experience in Gran Turismo 7 and after working out that game-ruining curbs bug that caused every cone racing online to get turbo boosts if they lay down and hit the curbs, the online racing in GT7 has been pretty good the last six months. The graphics are incredibly nice, too, and the sense of speed is the best in a GT game ever. Lying and pushing in an Audi R8 GTE on the Nordslingan gives a different feeling than doing the same thing in, for example, Assetto Corsa. There’s definitely more speed in Polyphony’s latest, even if you tweak the “field of view” settings in just about every other racing simulator, pretty much none of them can compete with Gran Turismo 7, here.
Since just over a day ago, there is now also full PSVR2 support in GT7 and then we are talking about the entire game, the game, in VR. Forget those few, fast, contentless VR races that were a very limited part of Gran Turismo Sport (and PSVR), here, as I said, it’s perfectly fine to drive through every millimeter of Yamauchi’s latest tribute to the automobile, with Sony’s new plastic helmet on the skull. And it works really, really well.
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I’ve done some racing in VR. In my opinion, the best until a few days ago was Automobilista 2, whose VR support was praised in rounds by many speed-crazy players. Codemaster’s absolutely brilliant rally simulator Dirt Rally 2.0 also includes good support for VR, just like Assetto Corsa, Iracing and Swedish Raceroom. However, none of these can compete with the VR support and how well it’s implemented in Gran Turismo 7, and of course Polyphony should have plenty of credit for that.
GT7 in PSVR2 is an amazing experience from the first moment. The feeling of total immersion that I get when, already in my first race with the helmet on my head, I jump into my Ferrari F40 and immediately get a phenomenally real feeling of actually sitting there, in Enzo’s cult-declared racing cart for the street – Is really something that every racing fan must experience. We knew two years ago that Polyphony spent more time on the interior of the cars in GT7 than almost all other developers in this genre, but it is in my opinion only now that it really comes into its own, when I sit there and can lean forward to look at the material of the steering wheel and the buttons on the instrument panel. The plastic looks like plastic, the carbon looks like carbon, and there’s a sense of depth here that I don’t think any other game can compete with in the racing genre. The distance between me and the steering wheel, between the steering wheel and the windshield, between the windshield and the hood and between the headlights and the road – Is so convincing and well-tuned that I was sucked in and laughed quite loudly on several occasions during my first three races.
Sure, there are a couple of minor concerns with the scaling, I think. My hands and legs/feet feel very small but they are probably modeled after a Japanese racing driver and not a two meter old bastard from northern Sweden which means that the only small complaint I have here should just be ignored. There is sharpness, crispness, depth and a fluidity to this image that the PSVR2 delivers that I think makes Gran Turismo 7 the perfect game to initially test your newly purchased PSVR2 with. Because it’s not Horizon: Call of the Mountain or Resident Evil: Village that is the new VR helmet “killer app”… It’s Gran Turismo 7.
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