Welcome to my short look and impressions of GT5 Prologue. Some of you may or may not know that I have imported GT5P from Japan as have allot of people on GTplanet.net, well I have had my copy for two days and I wanted to share what I like and dislike so far with promise of a full rundown on the game as soon as I’ve golded all the races.
With anticipation I flicked the switch at the back of my PS3 and pushed the PS button in the middle of my sixaxis controller after been greeted with the usual strings and flow of liquid across my screen I popped the game disk into the PS3 and loaded it up, now after reading the back of the box I knew I had to install at least 5GB of data onto the PS3’s HDD but it took its time to do this part of the process compared to other games, but saying that it all went along with no problems what so ever.
After the install I proceeded to watch the intro and in HD is looked awesome, after that I was placed into the main menu which is very nice and slick, its easy to find what your doing and although It’s a Japanese import its mostly in English so not problems there, then after turning the music off in the game and replays I had to purchase my first car, and after reading the impressions of people who already own I got myself the Integra Type R, the I jumped straight into the Makers Race and turned off all aids and switched to Pro mode.
After waiting for what seems like half a second I was prompted with race stats and details and the options to Race and various others like watching a race that is carried out with out me actually racing. Again click into the race you are starting to race within no time at all, its all very fast loading and Polyphony Digital have done a great job of optimizing the load times, especially considering the amount of stuff it has to load, so it begs the question why all other games have such long load times, this is obviously not down to load amounts, its just down to sloppy coding and sloppy workmanship, PD have really got the Next Gen vibe with things like this.
Playing feels so familiar yet also very new, the new pro mode physics are a great improvement over the aging GT4 template and the graphics are as you can see by the screenshots absolutely stunning but what really lets this game fall short of a true great is the sound, Tires and wind and engine sounds all sound like they have come from GT4 but just tweaked a little bit, they are poor especially when we have seen films with great audio fidelity and awesome sounding engines, Im just hoping they make it into GT5’s finished package, but slating the sound isn’t really a big thing as it does the job its meant.
The improvements have been not just seen in graphics, but also an area that has been slated in all GT games from the start and thats the AI, I have found the AI so much better, if your like me and try as hard to be a clean driver obviously making the slight mistake here and there the AI is great to drive with, they try and overtake each other and this can be a pain sometimes as they are 3 and 4 cars abreast and trying to find a way through can be hard but fun as it makes the game that little more realistic then you have the way they react to you if they are behind you they slow to avoid you and will over take and give you enough room to maneuver without ramming you off the track, but alas its not all so polished, they still stick to rigid lines and wont cut across to defend from an overtaking from you, but they do make the occasional mistake which is fun to see.
Overall I think GT5P is a bit of 50/50 game some things are a let down and others are fantastic, but for me i’ve been waiting for a really good GT experience since GTHD as the demos can only satisfy small portions of my desire for GT. So would I recommend this game to anyone else, well If like me you love GT then yes, if you are a casual gamer then I would say wait for GT5.
PD are obviously making inroads to the kind of realism they want but this effort seems to me more focused on the graphics rarther than the actual gameplay, but I've never had a real problem with any of the GT games so for me im as happy as a pig in muck.
Plus points:
- Lush Graphics
- Improved AI
Negative Points:
- Poor sounds
- No online (yet rumored to be added at Christmas)
Score: 80%