2.5/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Gran Turismo 7.

I don't like the racing genre, or at least I didn't for a long while. See, earlier this year I've played through one of my first "non-arcade" racing games in who knows how long, Forza Horizon 5, a game that I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. It's gorgeous, fun and filled with so much energy and passion behind it, it doesn't feel like a game created just to demonstrate the visual capacity of the hardware it's running off of, it's just a genuinely great racing game. That one game alone re-sparked an interest in this genre of video games that I wanted to explore beyond just Forza. Unfortunately, I'm not even going to be pretend that I enjoyed this game, in fact I liked it less and less as I continued playing it. The single player content for this game feels really dull, everything feels way too easy, even to someone who isn't used to realistic driving sims. Supposedly the campaign is nearly 30 hours long and I feel just as content with my rating now as I probably would with another 10-15 hours into that content. Everyone knows the single player offerings aren't what people play these games for, but I can confidently say I put a good while into the multiplayer portion to make up for it. The worst part of all, is that the fun multiplayer content is locked until you reach a certain part of the single player. Sure, it only takes an hour or two to unlock the multiplayer, but those are multiple hours the game forces you to spend on boring single player races against AI just to play online. Gran Turismo 7 is an example as to why I'm not into most modern day racing games, or at least these types of racing games. As someone who hasn't played a Gran Turismo game since Gran Turismo 3 on the Playstation 2, the visual leap was pretty drastic, like most racing games nowadays, it's gorgeous, but on the contrary, that's also the problem with games like this. I feel like every half decade or so, usually lining up with a console release, there's a brand new racing game that "pushes the boundaries" in visual fidelity. Yeah, of course Gran Turismo 7 does that, but that's almost all it does. I'm at a point when it comes to visuals in video games where I couldn't care less how realistic the game looks, because mechanically, Gran Turismo 7 still feels like Gran Turismo 3. You go around realistic looking race tracks over and over again that visually, have almost no differing qualities to them. I get that this is meant to be a more "classy" racing game compared to Forza Horizon 5, but the way it presents itself I found remarkably boring. I think one of the best aspects of this game has almost nothing to do with the game itself, but rather the Playstation 5 controller. I swear, every time I play a game that supports the adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, It drastically improves games for me. I don't know how Playstation managed to make a controller this good, but god damn does it work wonders with this game. If I didn't get anything out of the gameplay, at least I got something when my controller went "BURRRRR". Other than that this game made me feel disappointed, I probably wouldn't have played this game if I didn't receive it for free with my console, but I'm still glad I at least attempted to enjoy it. For now I'll just go back to my REAL-MAN'S racing corner of Mario Kart and Burnout.