A $10 game with a $60 price tag and nothing to offer but frustration and lousy game design
First off: The "simulator" tag title is as big a joke as any when it comes to this game. The physics model is somewhat accurate when it comes to steering the cars, albeit it seems VERY exxagerated most of the time. Beyond that there's no realism anywhere in the game. Your cars don't accelerate nearly as fast as their real-life counterparts, and AI cars of the exact same model accelerate way faster, resulting in the game forcing you to play catch up pretty much all the time. When you hit something sationary or moving, the car bounce around like you ran over a giant bouncing ball. AI drivers fly around the track, sometimes at speeds way higher than the cars they drive are capable off, even if they were tricked out to the limit. And speaking of tricking out your car: For every race you finish, your car looses 3-5 hp, forcing you to constantly having to add more tuning parts just to keep the performance somewhat constant.
And buying cars in the game is a pest in itself. The game contains more than 600 cars, albeit atleast 500 of them are so slow, old, and useless for the main purpose of the game, namely winning races, that the simple fact that they're included in the game only goes to show how much time Polyphony wasted putting cars into the game, instead of actually making the game. Excluding all the cars you can't use for anything, the few that remain that you can actually use to win races count a couple handfulls at the most. Although the game includes most of the American and Japanese cars in existence, it completely lacks cars from Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, and an incredible amount of obvious choices from the few European makers that ARE in the game are missing as well. So you can (if you play for enough time) drive the Ford GT40, but not the Porsche 956 and 962 that the GT40 was built to beat. As for actually buying the cars, if you don't actually win races, you won't earn enough credits to neither buy a different car, or upgrades for the ones you have, so that you can actually win the races you can't win with what you have at present. When you gain a license, you win a car that you can't use to enter, much less win, the races that license grants you access to. When you win a set of races, you win another car, which of course is just as useless. The logical approach to all the cars you win is to sell them, but nah, that would be too easy. Most the cars you win are prototypes, and as such the game won't let you sell them. You can put as many credits and parts into them as you wish, but the car will remain worthless. What's even worse is that unlike in real life where a winning car gains value, cars in GT4 looses value for every race, and nomatter how expensive parts you put into them, the price the game will let you sell them for is nowhere near a fraction of what you spend on them.
As the cash prices and car winnings are beyond stupidifyingly low, the game literally forces you to race the same races over and over again hundreds of times to give you enough credits to buy a car that can win the next series of races. Take the FF challenge for instance, the total winnings you can get for this series of 6 races is about 9600 credits. At the end you win a prototype Mazda 6, which have a value of 0, and is not permitted to race in any races in the game. But the following challenge, the FR challenge, requires a car of about 50,000 credits to be able to compete, and to win ALL the 6 races in this challenge, you need to put in atleast another 50,000 credits worth of parts. To put it short: You waste tons of time trying to beat the same races over and over again, and since the game makes your car slower for every race you take part in, you're forced to replace the car for about every 10 races, only the game doesn't actually give you enough credits to be able to do that.
The "racing licenses" that the game forces you to take are stupid in themselves. The things you have to do to get them for the very most part have absolutely nothing to do with what you'd have to do to obtain a racing license IRL. And what's even worse is that during the license tests you'll get disqualified if you as much as sniff the shoulder, whereas anything else in the game doesn't give a damn if your car is on or off the track, or if you obey any other racing rules whatsoever. The ONLY racing rule the game actually honours outside the license tests is the 3 second penalty for driving off-track, anything else have been thrown out the window.
The graphics that GameSpot, Polyphony, and so many else, claim are so outstanding, well, they're definitely not. The cars look good, but the tracks are so pixelated and dark that the turn markers are nearly impossible to read, making learning a new track very, very difficult.
The sound sucks, the music doesn't fit, and most the cars sound the same. Nomatter what the engine is, or who made it, nearly all the cars sound alike. It takes a lot of the fun out of the game in itself.
The exxagerated car handling you get used to. The incorrect and complete lack of acceleration is annoying at best. The stupid AI and disorganized menu you'll get used to as well. Winning races once you have a spitting chance isn't that heard either. But enjoying a game where you spend about as much time waiting for it to load as you do actually driving is not enjoyable. And having to race the same races over and over and over and over again simply because the prices for winning are beyond too low to compete in the next race, is not just stupid, it's so annoying that you quickly loose any interest you ever had in this game.
It's not that the game is hard to play. It's not the races are hard to win. It's the simple fact that the difficulty of the opponents goes up so fast that you have to buy a new car for every 6th race, and there's no way that you'll be able to do that with the winnings the game gives you.
Overall I'd say that this game is unfinished. The menu takes ages to load, even though the amount of graphics it contains is miniscule. And the actual organization of everything in the game is so far beyond braindead that the mere fact that this game has been released only goes to show that you don't have to know anything about cars, driving, game design, or physics, to make a bestselling driving game. The price tag is 6-10 times higher than it should be for a game this bad, and the mere fact that Gamespot gave it such a high rating makes you wonder what Polyphony paid them.