Here at last, Gran Turismo 5 is the first real outing for the venerable racing series on the high-def generation, after the false dawn of (free demo) GTHD Concept and (paid demo) GT5: Prologue. The game was stuck in development for what seemed like an eternity, finally arriving six years late. Such a long dev time begs the obvious question ‘what were they doing for all that time?’, but that’s really only one in a long list of questions we found ourselves asking after having spent the last month with the game. Playing the game for so long before reaching a verdict raised so many questions the review ended up as a list, maybe best viewed as an open letter to series producer Kazunori Yamauchi from a group of concerned long-time GT fans. So here it is, ranging from the obvious stuff that you might have seen in the day one reviews, to things you won’t even notice until you’ve levelled up as far as you may ever want to…

First things first; why, after a 50 minute install, does the game immediately prompt you to install yet more data, then apparently continue ‘installing’ at the start of every event? Why are there already three sizable patches to download, one after the other? Why, even after all the installing, does it still take more than 30 seconds to load an event, even a simple licence test? If you get the game for Christmas, will there be time to start playing before New Year?

Why can’t GT5 render a single 3D tree, instead producing incredibly basic, static, 2D cut-outs when other games can manage whole forests of them, all in 3D and all swaying in the wind?

Why are 80% of the car models in the game ‘Standard’ models, some of which have been imported almost directly from GT4 on the PS2 (which in turn took some of those models from GT3, released in 2001) when any professional modeller could have churned out half a dozen better models in a week? Although some Standard models are definitely better than others, the difference in quality between the game’s spiffy new ‘Premium’ models, the true ‘this generation’ models that bristle with detail and include fully modelled interiors, and the Standard models amounts to much more than just an interior view. While some Standard car models are high detail and clearly ‘Premium cars in waiting’ (PD promise they’ll be patching more models up to Premium in the coming months), many of the PS2 era-models are downright ugly; the models are blocky and angular; shut lines and door handles are drawn on with blurry, low-res textures. They’re about equal to the standard of the background traffic in Burnout Paradise, a game that’s now almost 2 years old itself. While there’s an argument that says 1000+ cars is better than 200, why are so many of the Standard models quite so ugly when they could so easily have been improved, if not to Premium levels then at least to somewhere in between?

And as for the car count, is it really right to count 30 Mazda MX-5s as different models in the 1000+ total? Or 10 Toyota Yarises when they’re all literally indistinguishable? Ditto for several of the Premium models; three are variants of the Suzuki Cappuccino (one being a Racing Modification) and 11 are NASCAR stock cars, i.e. the exact same model wearing different paint jobs. Who on earth would buy a racing game to compare the 10 different Yaris variants?

When Standard cars can only be bought from an in–game used car lot, whose stock of 30 cars rotates at a rate of 6 cars after each race, why is there not just one event, but two that require you to buy a specific vehicle or class of vehicle that only has a 800-to-1 chance of appearing? Why not let you at least check out the races you don’t qualify for yet to see what cars you might need in the future? Why make the used cars you’re allowed to buy dependent on your driver level, meaning if you see that 1 in 800 car and have the money, you may be excluded from buying it and will have to wait for the random stock rotation to pop it up again? Why do you frequently win the car you wanted for a particular event in that event? — either that or the car you really wanted pops up in the used car dealerships just after you complete said event. Why do you win duplicate prize cars in A-spec & B-spec races? Why are so many historically significant or just downright great cars relegated to Standard models, even ones that are new to the series for GT5? Why not select all the prize cars you’re awarded from the Premium range, or at least avoid the worst of the Standard models?

The problem becomes even more apparent in B-spec mode where you get to “manage” an idiot AI driver, or even a team of idiot drivers. For a start there is no tutorial and no explanation of this feature whatsoever, and although at first it’s strangely addictive nannying one of these morons around the track, constantly prodding him to maintain a sensible pace (via buttons to prompt him to slow down, maintain pace, speed up or overtake) could quite literally drive you round the bend. Leave a B-spec driver to his own devices and he’ll either slow to a crawl, or start driving faster and faster until he eventually starts spinning out. At the exact same point every lap! - Try and tell him to overtake and he’ll spend the next lap gently bumping into the car in front. Unbelievably, there seem to be a couple of corners that the B-spec AI is almost entirely incapable of negotiating, hitting the wall before the pit straight almost every time at Monaco and frequently spinning out at the Nürburgring GP track’s chicane even at kerb-crawling speeds. Why are B-spec races played out in real-time, missing the fast-forward option from previous games? Why are they up to four times as long as A-spec races, while giving as little as a quarter of the cash reward? Why can’t you pause the B-spec races? Why can't you take over/swap seats with your B-spec driver like you could in previous games? – Surely this would have made the endurance races possible even for the normal, non-hardcore psychos out there who aren’t prepared to play a game for 24 hours straight? Isn’t that the whole point of the B-spec concept and the thing that ties it to the A-spec game? Although you can now train up to 6 B-spec drivers who can swap at pit stops in the longer events, surely that was originally the whole point of the feature, now it's just "GT Manager," or the vaguest, most irritating way of controlling a racing car ever conceived and has seen gamers resorting to using autofire joypads to keep prompting their dopey B-spec drivers to “Increase Pace” while they go make a cup of tea, or got to bed, or watch a movie, or play another game on their other console, or go on holiday. Truly bizarre.

Past Gran Turismos have had some memorable music, but who on earth wants to listen to the mostly-terrible music selection that plays throughout the game and why is the option to disable it hidden away and not available while you’re driving? The music is a truly weird and wonderful—if diverse—collection of alternative, bossa nova, classical, dance & electronic, jazz, lounge and rock music. When “I Want You So Hard” by the Eagles of Death Metal and “Heads Will Roll” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are the best rock songs on the soundtrack, you have to worry.

What’s happened to the tuning options? Why are there no upgrades whatsoever for brakes and why does every car come with a brake bias controller set to 50:50 front/rear, making them more likely to fly through a corner backwards than slow down safely? What happened to engine balancing, port polishing, different levels of roll bar, displacement changes, engine swaps and 1/1.5/2 way LSD choices and why on earth does the top race gearbox upgrade not let you pick individual ratios, instead just giving you an arcade-style top speed/acceleration choice? All those tuning options have been in GT since the very first game. Why do AI drivers never make even the most simple of adjustments to the remaining options, allowing you to lap people at the speedways who hit the rev limiter about 20 feet down the first straight? Why do some cars have such stupidly unrealistic, and practically undriveable gear ratios, and why does hitting the rev limit cause temporary power loss? This doesn’t happen with a real engine, so why do we have to put up with it? Worst and most inexplicably of all, why the hell can’t you save any of your tuning setups? Are we really expected to write them down somewhere? When was the last time you had to do that? Changing from road race setup to high-speed oval setup and back three times in the NASCAR series makes this missing feature a real pain.

Also, why are the menus so clunky to use and why are some obvious shortcut buttons missing? Time and time again you’ll enter an event only to find that you need to upgrade your car or buy different tyres or something from the tuning shop or ‘GT Auto’ and you’ll be subjected to something like this: Back out of event screens (4 button presses) ~ LOADING SCREEN ~ find tuning shop on the home screen (probably another 4 presses of the D-pad or tapping the left stick) ~ LOADING SCREEN ~ find item ~ buy item ~ fit item (you can actually buy an item and not fit it so you end up with a stockpile of parts – WHY?) – this will take 4 more button presses ~ exit tuning shop (3 more button presses to get back to ‘home’) ~ find race again ~ LOADING SCREEN ~ then to set up ~ then make sure the game hasn’t arbitrarily put auto gearbox or traction control back on when you didn’t want it… and just like that – you’re ready to go! I mean, honestly—how did they manage to make putting the right tyres on your car such a quick procedure with only SIX years development time?

Coupled with a smaller number of events than previous games (even the Manufacturer Races have disappeared, and the actual GT mode calendar is otherwise quite short), the XP system seems more like a way to artificially extend the game than anything else, it’s the only explanation as to why there’s no XP bonus for turning driving aids off as in Grid, DiRT, Forza 3 and every other racer that’s decided to use an RPG-style levelling system. The traditional GT system of earning increasingly tough racing licences to unlock batches of events was not only more realistic, it was also much better from a gameplay perspective. Although licences have returned, they no longer unlock anything apart from the prize cars you get for completing them. But why is the licence test difficulty so uneven this time around? You’ll probably get a Gold first time here, be glad for a miserable Bronze and a ‘pass’ after 10 or 20 attempts there. Some of the tests are literally impossible with the driver assists the game automatically switches on and there's no way they were tested as well as in previous GTs. Since the sole remaining function of the licences is to teach you how to drive better, why are they impossible to pass if you follow the game’s racing line indication and why do the demo replays only show you how to get bronze times for some events?

And oh yes, the replay mode – it’s very nice to have a screen surrounded with telemetry at times, but why when you “hide” it does it keep coming back like some annoying floating jobbie? And why can’t you fast-forward or rewind replays? If you want to see an incident from a replay over again you have to quit the replay, reload it and watch the entire thing through again! And why is changing the view to another car in a replay so complicated? And whilst it’s nice that you can pause a replay and take a photo from just about any position (although the game will cheekily ask you to “move further away” if you zoom in too close to “Standard” models), adding effects, filters and suchlike this only raises another question; why do the undersides of most cars consist of no more than simple, low res blurry textures, and some are just dead flat pans, with no detail on the insides of wheels at all! (Bizarrely this includes the WRC cars, and which kind of car are you most likely to see the underside of?)

Why acquire licences for the WRC, NASCAR and Top Gear and completely waste the opportunities they present? None of the real-life drivers are present in their corresponding series (although Sebastian Loeb, Sebastian Vettel and NASCAR guy Jeff Gordon each have a Special Event named after them) and there are only a handful of real life cars from the 2010 seasons. The WRC licence doesn’t include one real-life rally location, or even a proper championship. Instead, rallying is relegated to a series of Special Events raced on incredibly bland automatically generated courses, featuring the worst pace notes ever seen in a rally game (apparently scouted by your halfwit co-driver for a different, much slower car, and possibly even on a different stage) and with the stupidest slippy-slidey rally physics yet seen in a GT game. Why can Milestone produce more convincing rally handling and physics in their first attempt at a rally game (WRC: FIA World Rally Championship) but after four tries PD are actually getting it more wrong with each attempt? Why are most of the rally stages made with the GT5’s course maker meaning they’re so unrealistic and featureless? There are only TWO purpose-built rally stages in the game, the rest being huge, wide featureless expanses, with not a rock, ditch or water feature in sight which somehow still manage to display the worst pop-up in a racing game for years; entire mountain ranges suddenly appear from nowhere, even though they’re the only scenery on view! Why when Evolution Studios' WRC game had rally course boundary tapes that you could drive through nearly ten years ago are GT5's solid as rock? And why are there no dirt effects and no tyre marks left in gravel or snow?

NASCAR only gives you a five race Championship with only two tracks from the real competition (Daytona and Indianapolis plus three that have right turns in as well), with a selection of 2010 cars, but the strange specifics of real oval racing are missing; there’s no aero benefit from hugging the wall, nor can you do asymmetric suspension geometry setups; quite a major factor in tuning a car to continually turn left; Papyrus provided a more realistic representation of the sport back in 1994 with ‘NASCAR Racing’, which also included real drivers, full damage modelling, including mechanical damage, more real-life tracks and the ability to save your tuning setups.

Why are so many of the online features of the game not active? There are menu options to share cars and B-spec drivers with your friends, but neither of these functions actually works. Instead, all your friends can do is look at them and neither they nor you can use them while they’re set online! Unbelievably, your cars get locked to 'online' even when you can't get on the server, leaving them stuck in unusable limbo! Why is there no match-making or any preset race classes to allow you to find a quick race? Had no-one ever tried to set up a race? Why does online racing not award any money or XP, or even have its own skill tracking system? Will any of these things be added by patches (so far, the option to restrict race entry other than by listing every single model that was allowed is the only major addition to online) and if so when? Otherwise, the online experience, when you find a race you’re allowed in, varies from perfectly smooth and hugely enjoyable to extremely laggy, depending on the connections of the other players.

Gran Turismo 5 is not so much about the game, the progression, the tuning or even the racing anymore as it is purely about the driving and the “car porn,” with the (Premium models only) Photo Travel mode allowing for some truly beautiful pictures. I'm beginning to suspect that maybe Kaz actually doesn't give a monkey’s about that other stuff; that what he actually wants to do is make the most realistic test-drive simulator in existence; that he'd be most happy just driving round an empty track all day in his favourite Suzuki Cappuccino, listening to the atrocious jazz-pop that your ears will be assaulted with; that he's trying to subvert the GT series towards that ultimate goal while Sony force the idea of racing and career progression onto him for commercial purposes; that even though those notions clearly don't fit with his vision, they've now become completely exasperated with him and finally forced him to chuck out his confused, half-hearted, unfinished attempt to meld the two diametrically opposing ideas before he bankrupts them. Therein lies the rub; if you share Kaz’s vision of the perfect game, you won’t even notice the problems. You’ll absolutely love GT5 and probably still be playing it when GT6 arrives in oh… about 20 years time on the PS5. If you’re expecting a more traditional racing game, more in line with earlier games in the series, you’ll be rather disappointed and more than a little frustrated by this latest instalment.