Gran Turismo 5

It boggles my mind that a game notorious for being meticulous when it comes to the presentation and recreation of cars can suffer so badly from some of the worst menus I've seen in gaming.

I'll prefix this by saying; the racing part of this game, it's fine. It's Gran Turismo. If you've played one of the others the handling will feel completely familiar. If you're only used to arcade racers, it might take a bit of adjusting, but it plays fine.

Everything else that the racing is packaged inside of? It's just horrible.

The first problem from this is everything takes *FOREVER*, just navigating from one menu to another takes seconds. I guess the biggest illustration of this is having just come out of race and wanting to navigate back to the hub menu... back out to the list races for the event... back out of the list of events... back out of the list of difficulties... and you're there, sounds dumb on paper, but just that simple act of navigating takes about 10 seconds... Now consider that with events that have restrictions on the types of cars you can use in it. Find you don't have a car, you have to back out all the way and back to the dealership, and pray that you remember the specific criteria! When you finally get into the "race start" screen... You have to wait for the game to finish loading the track/cars... Or whatever it's doing, all I know from the user perspective is it sits there for about 10 seconds before letting me actually play the race without indicating why I'm waiting.

Everything is just so slow and arduous it makes the game incredibly frustrating to play.

Also there's just constant pop ups; when you first access a mode, when you've completed a mode, informing you that you've unlocked a new paint job, which also take seconds of loading. It's insane.

The other big thing with this is the A-Spec/B-Spec... Having played GT before and remembering I have to become "worthy" of higher events, I figured I needed to start with B-Spec... Nope, this is a career mode for you to recruit AI drivers and let them ride your fancy new car. I believe there's a popup before you enter the mode, but I certainly don't feel it made it clear this was an AI only mode. The crazy thing about this mode is that you're not really even playing manager, you're just taking yourself out of the game and being replaced by another AI car in the race. You can tell your driver to "speed up/slow down/maintain speed/overtake", but I've never really noticed these commands having any effect. So you're just sitting there... Basically watching the game play itself while your driver constantly spins out. So you need to get them a car that's twice as fast as everything else on the field. All the mode's good for is starting it, doing something else and coming back to collect your driver's paycheck like you're some kind of racing pimp.

So A-spec where you actually get to play the game... Is also incredibly frustrating. Again, menu design just completely obscuring information you need. You're presented with a few tiers of difficulty (that you need to have a certain "level" to be able to play, so it prevents you skipping ahead), and inside a bunch of different events that have various criteria. Some races allow all cars, others only cars from a certain country...

The classics race where you have to drive a car made before 1979? Great! Except I sunk all my winnings into a car that as the race starts... Everything else on the field would slowly pull away from... I had no ability to win with the car I'd just spent all my money on...

And as mentioned, you'll have no idea what the criteria are until you click on an event. From there you can access your garage and it'll show what cars you own qualify for this race, then you click on one, wait for it to load, click "change car", confirm that you want to change car, then back out and click the race, and you're finally in!

There are a variety of different tracks, although many felt incredibly familiar having played GT games before (albeit a long time ago)... I'm unsure how many new tracks are in this game, but honestly I just felt like I was playing the same old GT game... Whether that's good or bad is probably down to personal preference.

One of the hub menu's options is just entitled "special events"... Not really making clear what this meant I investigated. For most part it just seems a set of tracks where you have to drive predetermined cars. One involved having to make it through different sections of a track in certain time limits... However rather than being one continuous flowing series, each time you have to back out to the menu and wait for the race to load to try the next section.

It had go-karts... They were no end of frustration, but at least they handled completely differently... Even if it did mean I was feeling like I was taking corners the same way each time but randomly spinning out.

I guess the biggest problem is that with GT, the game portrays an expectation that you're going to finely tune a single car to your specific playing style... But with the absurd amount of restrictions on events (and the trophies encouraging you to buy so many cars), you never really "settle" on one car, you use a car for an event, max it out, win the race (if you're lucky enough to have bought a car that can actually win it) and move on to the next.

While actually engaged in the racing part and in a car where I was on even terms with the AI, I had fun, though it did grow tedious having to play the same races again and again to accumulate enough money to progress with the game. I feel like for every hour of fun I had, I had two hours of boredom to counter it. And the B-spec stuff is obviously just their to be an easy money maker for you, considering there's basically nothing for you to do in it, you just watch.

And the watching? Well, the cars look great (though it's crazy how they separate cars basically into "detailed" and "eh, these look fine"), though the backgrounds look kinda crappy, heck the recycled tracks feel like the backgrounds are taken straight from the previous versions. But worst of all... It feels soulless... Even being able to see the drivers in the cars, they "feel" like robots rather than people. And that carries over into the way they drive... It's soulless... Monotonous... For the most part I'm racing against myself to see how well I do at a track than I am against the other drivers...

I guess the best way I can put it is that I'm aware I'm late coming into playing GT5, but as a fan of previous games in the series, I have no interest in playing GT going forward. This game just focuses on the things that I'm not interested in and this game serves as a huge lesson in the risks of sacrificing functionality in the name of presentation. Nothing this game strives for in that regards is done well.