Gran Turismo 7 – 25th Anniversary Edition (PS4)

My first session with Gran Turismo 7 lasted about four hours, and roughly half of that time was spent watching unskippable cutscenes, chatting with stock-photo characters at the in-game Cafe, and navigating menus that feel more like a lifestyle app than a racing game. That tension between a world-class driving engine and a cumbersome shell wrapped around it defines the entire experience. When you do get on track, the physics are genuinely hard to argue with. Elevation changes, weather, road surface, vehicle downforce, tyre compound - all of it feeds into how a car responds through a corner, and even a minor late braking point will send you into the gravel. The handling model sits in that productive middle ground between full simulation and accessible simcade: patient enough to punish sloppiness, forgiving enough that a controller player can find rhythm without a wheel rig. Over 90 track layouts are in the game, including Nurburgring, Le Mans, Laguna Seca, and returning fan favourites like Trial Mountain - though some of those returning circuits have been redesigned in ways that flatten their character. The car roster runs deep, with tuning options stretching across more than 650 performance parts per vehicle, wide-body kits, livery customisation, and a real-money-linked valuation system for Legendary Cars that ties in-game prices to actual classic car market data from Hagerty. The career structure is where opinions split hard. The Cafe hands you Menu Books - essentially a series of themed car-collection goals that funnel you through races and unlock the game's history of automotive culture. On paper it is a clever framing device; in practice it means grinding race events with rolling starts, always starting from the back, with AI opponents that hold their lines competently on higher difficulty but feel more like obstacles than rivals. There is no rewind function, which adds genuine tension to a clean lap, but the absence of meaningful damage modelling cuts the other way - a 150mph barrier impact and you simply carry on, which feels strange given how seriously the game takes everything else. Sport Mode, GT7's competitive online layer, uses a Driver Rating and Sportsmanship Rating system that punishes dirty driving and rewards consistent clean racers. For players who want structured online competition rather than lobby chaos, it is the most compelling long-term hook the game offers. The controversy that followed the 1.07 update - reduced race payouts, high in-game credit prices on top-tier cars, and an always-online requirement that locked players out during a 30-hour server outage - is not ancient history you can ignore. The economy is still built around friction that nudges players toward purchasing credits with real money. The most desirable legendary cars can sit at price points requiring dozens of hours of grinding or a wallet supplement. That is a genuine and ongoing design problem in a full-priced release, and it is right to flag it before you spend anything. Who should buy this? Car enthusiasts who want to spend meditative hours doing time trials at Willow Springs, tuning builds, and learning the history of the Porsche 911 variants through the Cafe menus will find a lot to love here. Competitive players who want a structured online racing ladder with actual consequence for dirty driving will find Sport Mode worth the admission cost. Pure racing game players who want an aggressive single-player career with standing starts and close wheel-to-wheel battles will leave frustrated. The Scapes photo mode, which lets you place any car in hundreds of real-world locations with full lighting controls, is also legitimately one of the best in the genre - a strange but real reason some players log hours without racing at all.

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