Gran Turismo 5

Gran Turismo 5 is the latest installment in a long running series Gran Turismo. Before this latest offering, there was a long gap of several years, and it shows in the overall improvements this particular game offers. Gran Turismo 5 is a car racing simulation, and the careful rendering is so good, there are times when you can’t tell the CG from the real thing.

This game is hard to compare to other racing sims, because it blows most of them out of the water. Project Cars might be close, without the variety.

Incredibly realistic

It’s not just the graphics that make Gran Turismo 5 realistic. It responds to changes you make to the car as if it were the real thing.

This means if you add speed to a car that wasn’t designed for it, you’re going to get a car that is as wild and hard to control as if you’d done it to the real thing.

The game takes this a step farther by shaking the screen to simulate the same rough ride you might get from testing out these cars, and if you’re playing during a rain storm you can almost feel the rain as it sprays across your wind shield.

Over 1,000 cars in the garage

You could spend the rest of your life in the garage, tinkering with different cars, and never run out of things to do. There is a mind boggling number of cars and karts available for upgrading, and there are several layers of upgrades each car can have.

One very minor flaw in the game is that only about 200 of these cars have the full treatment in terms of the raw beauty of their renders, while the rest look like more typical playstation cars. This is understandable as that is a huge number of cars to give the premium treatment to, but when you compare these cars it’s a very noticeable difference.

A couple of the tracks are also less visually stunning, but in many cases this is understandable. Some of the testing areas are pretty ho-hum in real life too, so there’s little point in spending time on detailing them.

Stable multiplayer

Gran Turismo 5 has an online option, and this option is refreshingly stable. The online portion can handle up to 16 cars, and seldom crashes despite this number of people in the game. This is a great opportunity to truly test modifications in these cars, and see how they stack up against each other.

Online the game is a straight up racing simulation, but even then the game manages to pull off a few interesting additions.

One of these includes the ability to allow red lighting, or false starts to the game. This can really ratchet up the attention, and provide yet another layer of realism to it.

Pros:

• Eye popping graphics
• Realistic racing
• Over 1,000 cars to play with
• Endless upgrading
• Responsive cars

Cons:

• Some lower end graphics