Value and presentation:
As always, GT’s value never really ends. We will be racing forever and ever until the next GT game comes out, and online race mode adds even more to the value of the game over and above previous GTs. Unfortunately, the online mode is pretty jittery at the moment.
Since everything is online based, loading times sometimes suffer incredulously. I’ve suffered a 10 minute load time after exiting a race because, I dunno, the server crashed or something. Nowadays, if I just want to play single player, I disable my internet connection. It gets that annoying.
The online race mode isn’t as polished as I had hoped it would be. Lag is often and crashes are usual. It takes forever to load too. Improvements will likely come later, but at the moment, I steer clear of it and just play alone. Then again, every huge game has some clunky online starts, especially from Sony (Yeah, I’m looking at you LBP!).
Even in offline mode, however, load times are just too long. Every screen you go to requires one, and you sometimes get sick of seeing the silver GT logo flashing. Maybe it would’ve been better if they had a better looking loading screen than that, or optimized the damn thing to make it faster; I mean, I installed the game’s 8GB or something ridiculous. It should run much faster than that.
On the plus side, the elegance of the presentation balances out the flaws nicely. Starting out the game gives you a feel of walking into a lavish car showroom. Everything is nice and shiny, the menus, to me, are easy to navigate and intuitive, and though I don’t give a crap about the Facebook thing, I’m sure it’s a welcome addition to those who like networking.
Photo mode is also surprisingly addictive. The environments are very pretty indeed, and the customization options for taking pictures feels like a whole game by itself. I can spend hours getting the perfect angle and lighting for my car’s photograph.
It feels like the game was built less as a pure game and more as showcase for cars. It has so many menus that do take time to navigate, but it creates an epic feel for the game that serves as a large style advantage. Unfortunately, all that style must compromise with performance somewhere, and the game just didn’t create enough functionality to be totally streamlined.
Gran Turismo value and presentation score: 8.0
Just a Game value and presentation score: 7.5
