Of course, a Gran Turismo game wouldn’t be complete without more eccentricities outside of the career mode, and GT6 is no exception to that tried-and-tested rule.
It’s perhaps developer Polyphony Digital’s way of streamlining the game’s core mode after the divisive MMO-esque Experience Points levelling system in GT5, and recent patches adding new races to the career mode – such as the Gornegrat League and Freshman Cup races that came in the day one ‘V1.01’ update – does provide hope of the core singleplayer component being bulked up in the coming months, but the current roster of races is currently a shade too sparse for this reviewer’s liking. In contrast, it would take considerably more time to conclude previous full-bore GT games.
The big issue here is the length of the campaign, or rather the lack of – not including the time it took to complete the optional events such as the Mission Races, One-Make events and Coffee Break challenges (which we’ll get back to in a moment), it took this tester roughly 40 hours to wrap-up the entire career mode. The diversity of the events themselves is nothing to complain about, with everything from rallying to NASCAR oval runs to kart events and even condensed endurance races all featured in the various tiers.
In fact, the only area you could perhaps argue the game is lacking singleplayer-wise is with the career mode.
And those stats are only set to increase with the proposed free and paid-for downloadable additions to the game… But that’s still a fantastic achievement in Polyphony’s part, and – even with the rough-around-the-edges relics from GT games of yore – there are still more vehicles and circuits, in a far greater diversity, than in any other out-of-the-box racing game on sale today. Granted, there have been a moments of corner cutting here and there to boost those figures up (there’s “only” 800 or so cars in the game if you don’t consider the duplicates to be separate models, with roughly half of those being slightly retouched ‘Standards’ ported from GT5). Whether it’s the 1,200 cars, the 100+ track variations from 37 locales – with new highlights being the arrival of Silverstone, Mount Panorama, Brands Hatch a retouched Apricot Hill and the fictional Matterhorn route in the Swiss Alps – or even the 88 different types of aftermarket wheel designs available to bolt onto your various virtual motors, the statistics associated with GT6 are nothing short of extraordinary. GT6’s more recent predecessors (not including the bite-sized Prologue versions, for obvious reasons) were already lavished with vast swathes of virtual material to tinker with, and this new instalment really ramps it up to ‘we duly tip our hats off to you, Sir’ levels. Of all the complaints that can be levied at Gran Turismo 6, a lack of content on offer certainly isn’t one of them. There’s no denying that most of what’s made the GT franchise great over the last 15 years has been massaged to seventh-gen perfection here: it’s just disheartening to report that the rest of the game doesn’t quite live up to the headline-grabbing highlights.
That same criticism can also – sadly – be levied at its successor, the PS3 curtain call that is Gran Turismo 6. There were plenty of great, jaw-dropping moments in GT5: it was just a shame that almost everything else between was disappointingly mediocre.
Regardless of whether you were smitten with or despised Gran Turismo 5, it’s quite hard to argue against the claim that it was an inconsistent game.