Gran Turismo 6 Early Impressions

There was a lot wrong with Gran Turismo 5 when it launched, and it took months and maybe even years of patches and updates for Polyphony to get the game to the point that it really should have released at. In some ways, Gran Turismo 6 echoes that process, with things such as Community Clubs pushed back to next year, but is it still worth your time?

While the review embargo is up, I want to spend more time with the game and so you will have to wait until early next week for our full review. However, from initial impressions, it’s apparent that the game has learnt a lot from GT5’s mistakes, even though it also has much in common. The menu system is more refined, removing many of the unnecessary button presses and waits, while the career’s layout is also better defined, with license tests brought back into the main progression.

Special Events return, with the Goodwood Festival of Speed unlocked early on and a trip to the Moon not long after, but within the career itself the Coffee Break levels are a nice diversion, and let you try something a little bit different different. Puttering your way around Suzuka with just 1L of fuel, while also trying to beat a specific time, was a fun and interesting challenge.

They help to break up the monotony of the actual races, if they can be called that. The difficulty level starts so low, with the AI so slow and the way the difficulty ramps up so gradual, that I found myself habitually going to races with a car 100 Performance Points lower than the competition, simply not bothering to acquire upgrades or better cars. It doesn’t seem to get too much better either, and even if the challenge is greater through the first place car starting further ahead, I’m not really racing against the AI, just driving past them.

At least I’m seeing and enjoying the new tracks, and earning a fairly steady stream of cash in the process. Classic real world tracks like Bathurst, Silverstone and Brands Hatch make a very welcome appearance, as Spa and Motegi return from GT5’s DLC packs, and we also see a few of the older GT favourites getting the HD treatment, with Apricot Hill Raceway a lovely place to visit.

Though Autumn Ring also got a refit from its time in GT5, others weren’t so lucky and the tunnel on Trial Mountain still looks pretty rubbish. The same can be said of the car selection, where the divide between Standard and Premium is no longer present. All cars are purchasable at all times from the dealership – the second hand dealer is banished – but the quality of the Standard cars is still quite a bit lower, even as the worst looking machines have been improved.

It’s the price paid to have such a vast selection of cars in the game, but can be quite jarring. It’s also quite odd to be playing with next to no cars again, coming from a nearly complete selection in GT5, and that’s something I’ll have to put in the hours to rectify.

While the game is noticeably more retrained with the number of cars it hands out as rewards, it has always given me something quite appropriate for upcoming races. With 500,000 credits in the kitty after a number of hours, I’ve only had to buy a handful of cars to have something valid for each particular set of races, picking wisely from memory and choosing cars that can straddle categories. Oh, and be sure to grab the Mercedes-Benz AMG Vision Gran Turismo as an incredible freebie for the middle of the career.

With the most expensive cars retaining the same values as were seen in GT5, it feels like the overall balance of the in game economy is roughly the same as before. I’m not even vaguely tempted to buy extra credits, but I do hope to see the regularly added Seasonal Events come in on the more generous side of things, to help out the regular players as they bolster their collections. The Seasonal Events were a big help in filling out my car collection last time around.

It’s not available until you’ve progressed in the career, but online is where the most of my racing will surely get done, as TSA’s regular group of racers shift over to the new game, and thankfully this has seen a vast improvement as Polyphony have sought to help the community and give them more comprehensive options online. Though I’ve yet to race online, I’ve briefly had a nose around and, at a glance, the settings for the races aren’t just better laid out, but also more expansive. A qualifying session is now an option and you can have mandatory pit stops and so on, more easily allowing you to create quick and simple championships, though there are more features planned which will need to be patched in.

At first blush, Gran Turismo 6 is a straight forward superset of 5. It has almost all the content that was there before, and has then gone on to add to more tracks, more cars, and generally polish and improve on what it needed to. It still has its flaws, with the dull AI my main annoyance at the moment, but if you like Gran Turismo and are happy to still be gaming on your PS3, then you should certainly take a look.