Generous score. I can't give it more than 6/10 myself in its current state, despite the fact that I can't stop playing.
A lot of that can't stop playing comes from having to grind all my spare time to be able to afford the cars I like to use, the older ones which go for up to 20 million a piece in the Legendary Car Dealership. The last patch has done a lot to improve payouts, yet not for the races I like to do. Custom endurance races with grids line-ups you create yourself still sit at 60K for a 12 hour endurance race. So instead of doing what I want to do most, I'm using a PP glitched Tomahawk to farm for credits to be able to build the line-up I want to race against.
It's a 6 at most due to:
- Lack of content. There are no races (yet) for the faster cars, not for the slower cars the game keeps throwing at you. All there is in PP 400 to PP 800 races against moving pylon AI. GT Sport has at least double the amount of content, however that was after years of support. Launch content of GT7 is more than what GT Sport launched with.
- The online is a big step back from GT Sport. Missing features, worse stability, new bugs on top of the not fixed old bugs, daily races split between ps4 and ps5, and no way to track your progress. PD has it all blocked now, no more stat tracking like what was possible with GT Sport on Kudos Prime and other sites.
- MTX, PD threw us a big bone with the last update but it's mostly one and done payouts. Grinding Tokyo with a glitched Tomahawk can get you a bit above 2 million credits an hour, almost on par with GT Sport. Yet there are more very expensive cars in GT7 and you can add another 500K to 700K per car for tires and tuning. And they only appear for 4 or 5 days, then who knows when they show up again. I missed out of the XJ13 and the 917K, 2 cars I really wanted to race but couldn't grind fast enough.
Dynamic time and weather are the star of GT7. Watching the track dry up, puddles slowly disappearing in the sunrise, absolutely stunning and challenging to race in these conditions. However a lot of tracks don't have night and/or rain implemented. It can't rain on Mount Panorama and the sun can't set at Spa. Brand's hatch has neither.
GT7 is a live service game through and through, meaning it's basically early access. It's not finished and it shows.
Then there are the technical issues. I was not expecting to see so many frame rate drops on PS5. The PS5 should be capable of showing better spray effects, yet the current ones already cause frame rate issues in traffic with the light changing. The server connection is bad as well, I get at most 3 bars and have received numerous penalties due to cars stalling with lag. On PS4 Pro you're better off setting the output resolution to 1080p. Doing this weeks Spa race with dynamic time has very unstable fps on ps4 pro in 4K HDR. While the game hasn't crashed on me, the races have. An unexpected error has occurred, thrown out of the online race, ratings tanked.
But it undeniable looks amazing when it all works
GT7 has a lot of potential, but also has a long way to go to get there. The UI is slow and cumbersome, so many missing QoL features, plenty bugs and generally very unbalanced. Back to lapping the entire field 3 times in the Tomahawk, still have 38 million to go for the current line up in the LCD.
