Impressions after an evening with GT Sport. We will start with the positive stuff:
- Graphics are a bliss, pure racing game porn. Especially the material and the athmosphere effects are phenomenal
- Performance is smooth and stable
- Menus are fast and slick
- Interlagos is amazing
- The marshals waving flags is a lovely detail and adds a lot of athmosphere
Uhm... Well, that was it, unfortunately. Now the negative:
- The abysmal track list. I am bored of the fictional tracks after one evening already, the ovals are Daytona USA grade arcade nonsense and the rally
tracks are traditionally useless
- Speaking of which, their sorry excuse for a rally mode still sucks big time, they havent tried to come up with something better or adressed none of its
its major flaws since GT5, sorry but that is beyond laughable
- FFB is rather basic and numb compared to the competition (T300)
- I cant hold a slide for the life of me in the level 6 Group B stadium challenge, car either stalls out when I floor it to induce oversteer or just does a 180
- Sounds are an improvement but in this day and age the competition doesnt sleep... Raceroom this aint, by a country mile
- The tire and crash sounds deserve a dishonorable mention
- AI is the same pathetic joke as it always was, I ran out of fuel at Interlagos and every last damn bob rammed into my rear end while overtaking me
- Loading times for the challenges are rather long for 20 second bursts of action
- You can already see how the career mode is running thin after an evening, this will not keep you busy nearly as long as any of its predecessors
- Last and most important: Whoever came up with the idea that you shouldnt be able to save your progress when the servers are down needs to be
publically shamed and fired. This is by far the worst game design decision I have come across yet in 28 years of being a gamer.
The last point might be rectified with a patch, but the rest..? Sadly, not only is there a lot of huge problems, most of them are still legacy faults carried over from previous GT titles, so I m not optimistic they will ever be adressed. 20 years from now, GT titles will probably still have gameplay as if it was still 1997.
Therefor in conclusion, this is a title I might pick up for 20 quid some time down the line for sentimental reasons, depending on whether they fix the terrible tracklist with free additional tracks that are actually interesting.