Publisher/Developer: Sony/Polyphony Digital
Genre: Racing Sim
Price: £29.99/£21.99 (PSN)
Verdict: The best disappointment of 2009 without a doubt.
Pros: The best driving mechanics and graphics to be found on the PSP.
Cons: No career mode. No career mode. No bloody career mode.
Let’s be brutally honest: it’s about time Sony released a PSP version of Gran Turismo. So, after having been made to wait for so long, what has Polyphony served up for us?Definitely a game with two sides to it. On the one hand, we have the most incredibly polished racing sim that the PSP has ever seen. On the other, we have a game that very much values style over substance.
Start up Gran Turismo and you are greeted by an exquisite rolling demo taken from footage of Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 and it is there to wow. After that you are gently encouraged to take on the Driving Challenge mode first to hone your driving skills before taking on the races. Fire into the Driving Challenge mode and you will be pushed to the limit of your skill and frustration with some short set-up manoeuvres designed to train you up.
The Driving Challenge mode throws a decent sized set of scenarios designed to prepare you to be as fast as you can be. Cornering exercises, overtaking practice and set-ups designed to learn the nuances of the different transmission types of the 800 cars that are available to you in the game.
The next move is onto the racing and when you choose the Single Player mode, after the interest generated by the Driving Challenge, you may feel a huge disappointment. You choose a car, a race-type (time trial, race or drift trial) and track from one of 32 and away you go. The game throws three opponents at you and you race for your credits to open up more cars for your garage. This is it though, there’s no career mode where you can build up a reputation, win some races and kick some ass.
There is multiplayer and you can share and trade your cars with your mates but again, what you see is what you get.
The racing is actually very good. The cars all have their own individual characteristics and all 800 have been painstakingly modelled and profiled to handle as close to reality as the PSP can handle. The tracks are also amazingly well designed and I actually found myself marvelling at the scenery as I hammered up Broadway on the New York track, to the point where I hit the barrier at the evil hairpin they have placed in Times Square.
Again there is a ‘but.’ Polyphony have put in the work to make Gran Turismo incredibly detailed and accurate in so many respects but have failed to make a full game out of it. The lack of a career mode has reduced Gran Turismo from the epic kill-all racing game that it should have been to an incredibly well designed minigame.
In playing Gran Turismo I was struck by a horrendous feeling of ambivalence. To begin with I am overawed by the detail and sheer playability of the racing modes in the game. At the same time, despite the impressive depth of the game’s details there is an awful shallowness to the whole game. There is an overwhelming feeling that Gran Turismo was designed as a pick up and play experience and nothing more, a disjointed series of single and multiplayer races with no real sense of structure beyond the collecting of credits to unlock more cars to race.
This can be liberating; an unlimited set of racing experiences using the most incredibly detailed racing engine ever designed for a portable device, but, the lack of a finite career structure will make many hardcore gamers (including this one) feel exceptionally cheated.
I am really torn between two verdicts. In many ways Gran Turismo is the most awesome racing experience I have ever had on any handheld but in dropping a career mode the game loses the true substance that it requires to keep any long term interest.
Fans of driving games will probably get a great amount of enjoyment from Gran Turismo PSP. It’s fast and fun and incredibly realistic. Fans of the series will feel let down though. Not building in a career mode into such a detailed game is a huge gamble in the current climate especially when Sony are already going out on a limb with the PSP Go. It is bold to take a risk and Gran Turismo may just find some new fans from this effort but they will do so at the expense of a whole lot of existing ones.
Popularity: unranked [?]
