Gran Turismo 6 review: is it better than actually driving your car?

I learned to drive this year. When my brother isn’t cruising and trying to pick up chicks with the family car, I get to use it, and boy, do I love it. There’s nothing quite like zooming down a straight road in a car with a manual transmission. Auto cars just don’t cut it. But as much as I enjoy driving in real life, I have never liked racing games, so I was pretty bummed when I got our review copy of Gran Turismo 6.

The Gran Turismo series of games target a more niche audience than the usual guys who indulge in the Need for Speed franchise. It’s more serious, more realistic, and is often played by driving sim enthusiasts with the full three-monitor, racing car seat, driving wheel and pedal getup. It doesn’t appeal to a mass audience because the focus of the Gran Turismo game is on the car and its drive. I was expecting to die of boredom halfway through a race.

I was wrong, of course. Gran Turismo 6, while lacking in fancy, overly detailed graphics and the wailing of police sirens, is quite the driving experience.

To begin with, there’s an endless selection of real-life, and very accurately replicated racing cars. These cars can be purchased through credits, which you can only earn via the Career mode. If you’re the impatient sort, there are some pretty fancy and powerful cars available as rentals in the Arcade mode. Buying a car is the obvious choice in Gran Turismo 6, though. Apart from being able to choose your favourite model (should you earn enough credits), you also get to customize it.

While Gran Turismo 6 lacks the customization power available in other racing games, it does make customization incredibly realistic. Players are given simplified choices for what goes under the hood, out the back, and on the exterior of the car. Of course, like any mod done to a car, these changes don’t come cheap – but boy, that sense of ownership they give you after your stock car morphs before your eyes? That’s priceless. And that keeps you invested in the game.

As someone who has never touched a driving sim, I found Gran Turismo 6 very intuitive to pick up, and simple to play, at least on the racetrack. Driving on snow or dirt tracks took a little more time to master, and I will probably never know how well Polyphony Digital replicated the experience given that I live in sunny Singapore, but my experience on asphalt was hands-down amazing.

I was pretty psyched to see that my car in Gran Turismo 6 basically mimicked the sound and behaviour of cars out there on the road. It stuttered when I failed to shift the gear up, the engine nearly croaked it when I shifted up too quickly, and it made familiar noises when I downshifted too quickly. Each stock car model handles differently, and can be modified to great, super-realistic detail. How the cars handle also depends on the type of terrain you’re driving on, and if they’ve been tweaked for the task.

Speaking of tweaking, player options in Gran Turismo 6 are numerous. They range from adjusting minor details like your blind spot indicator on stream to practically overhauling your engine. I mentioned the game’s car customization above but I need to mention it again: cars are complicated, but Gran Turismo 6 breaks it down so that even someone who doesn’t understand cars can understand what’s about to happen when you upgrade. It also helps that there are always visuals to guide you along. You can also buy new outfits for your driver, though that’s really secondary because in Gran Turismo 6, the vehicle is king.

I have a few gripes with the game though: one, it gets really repetitive after a while, especially if you’re not a geek about cars, because you have to keep playing the same tracks again and again if you suck at them. Two, the music is awful.

Career mode has a fixed difficulty, and you need to get first place to earn enough stars to unlock the next track. If you’re not good enough, you can accumulate the stars. But that means racing the same track over and over till you master it. That’s boring. And the music, no doubt created in some sound engineer’s booth to avoid having to pay royalty fees for actual music, is boring. It’s not annoying, but it’s nothing spectacular, and listening to it repeatedly is going to piss you off like it did me.

I felt a little disappointed by the lack of dents and physical feedback in the cars as well. I get it that the Gran Turismo games are car porn box sets, but knocking into a rival car should at least net me some sort of penalty. Maybe add a dent to my car a la those cheap Daytona games in the arcade. Maybe make me flip and have to restart from gear one. Anything’s better than just giving me a metallic-sounding bump, slowing me a little, and leaving my car perfectly unscathed. I wasn’t too impressed by the visuals either; they’re realistic, sure, but I typically like shiny, over-the-top exaggeration because I’m playing a game to escape real life, not to replicate it.

Give some crash plz?