A total let down in almost every way possible. Save your money for Forza Motorsport on the Xbox.
Alright, lets get gameplay out of the way first. In this day and age of 2005 and being the leader of simulations, Gran Turismo not having cars take damage when they hit the wall at 100+ mph is ludicrous. You can still play the lets bounce off the wall and actually come off it clean still going at least 50 with no penalties. I also think that the whole feedback and feel of driving needs to be improved upon. I have gone drifiting in real life, and this game does not even feel close to what it does in real life. In real life, if you turn the wheel the wrong way, or too hard, your tire will dig in and set you way off from your intended drift path. In GT4, it feels like you are skating along glass. Next on my long list of glaring problems with this game is the fact that they actually made loading times longer in this game than past ones. And its really bad too, its not the kind of 2-5 second load times, this can be up to 20 seconds for a race, and just changing parts on the car can take up to 5-10 seconds. Another thing I hate is AI is just as retarded as the last. You would think that it would eventually get better, but its still the same since the original back in the mid 90’s. And what was that…didn’t they promise us online and that is a reason why they delayed it? Hmmm, I don’t see anything in the menus…maybe the hid it. Yep, that’s right, there is no online play at all. The included LAN, but seriously, who hooks two playstation 2’s together. You don’t hear of such a thing. One thing they did get right is when you are sitting in the cockpit view, you are rocking and rolling all over the place when in a rally race, and when you are in a road race, you can feel the acceleration.
Onto the graphics part of the game. Well they are a real improvement over the past third installment, but that’s not saying much. I am going to review this with and without an HDTV. If you don’t have one, the backgrounds are going to look jaggy and fuzzy at the same time…how the hell can that happen? You tell me. With HD, the graphics are cleaned up pretty well. Cars now look amazing, still better than Forza’s. But the roads, foliage, distant landscapes still look pretty dingy.
Sound. What can you say…even with Dolby Pro Logic…which is alright. IT SUCKS! There is no way around it, yeah, the cars do sound great with the digital optical cables, but where is the Dolby Digital and whatnot? Pro Logic does not do the cars justice. But what the hell is with the constant popping of the exhaust…that means you have an exhaust leak, or unburned gasoline is hitting your exhaust manifolds and exploding in there…which is a serious problem. It does not sound cool at all. I dunno, maybe them Japanese love that coming from their slow, fugly, 4-bangers, but in America, it’s a different story. I also hate the music in this one. Even now that they have the Flopdrive out…aka…sonys hard drive that they sold with Final Fantasy XI, the system still doesn’t support soundtracks. So you are stuck with the crappy music they give you. Gran Turismo 3 has some of the greatest tunes out of the GT’s…nothing beats Gran Turismo 2 though.
Overall, I decided to wait to rate this game before I got a good shot at Forza Motorsport when it came out in spring…2 months after Gran Turismo 4. I wanted to see which was better and why and then relate that to what the other party could have done. And don’t say 20/20 is always hindsight because 2 months is not much time at all to fix any problems…if there really were any with Forza. Overall, this game flopped in my book. There are really no improvements other than Hi-Definition. Menu is harder than the last to use, and nothing was really upgraded.
The Bad: Racing opponent AI is as dumb as ever; lack of damage modeling encourages sloppy driving; musical soundtrack is hit or miss; b-spec mode: huh?; no online.