While you’re selecting your car and playing with the menu options, in the background you see your car in a garage with all your mechanics and drivers working on it. There are full race replays on two tracks that aren’t playable in this demo one being the Daytona Oval track and the other is the Fuji Speedway. When you see a random car in one of the photo mode sets (small German town or broken down castle) you will repeatedly doing double takes. The level of detail in the environments and the lighting in particular make this one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen. Never has such a level of photorealism been reached in a game before.  I’ve gone to say how great the graphics are but they aren’t without fault. A lot of the cars have jaggies and tons of shimmering is present. There some issues of the shadows on the cars themselves as well. It does detract a bit when everything is so drop dead gorgeous, but in no way makes this a bad looking game not by a long shot. Recall that this is a demo of a preview and without a doubt all these issues will be ironed out when the full game is released next year.

Now on to the game play, one of the problems I’ve had with previous GT games is that the AI has always been kind of stupid. You could park your in the middle of the road and the AI would just slam into full speed. Looks like Polyphony digital has paid attention and the AI does appear to be better, they will try to avoid your car if it’s in the way and they make mistakes too. In general the AI appears to make an honest effort in battling for position, you’ll be cut off and they’ll try to pass you in the braking lanes. It definitely appears to be a step in the right direction.

Now if you are fortunate to have a racing wheel in particular the Logitech G25 this awesome game gets even awesomer ( yeah I know that’s not a real word ) Full force feedback, 6 speed H gate shifter, paddles and clutch really helps draw you into the game. If the car only has paddle shifters like the small Daihatsu then you can only use the paddle shifters on the G25. There is a certain amount of precision that can only be attained by driving with a wheel and obviously the lack of rumble makes it hard to recommend using the SIXAXIS. You’re going to be missing out quite a bit going that route. Nothing is more satisfying than as you’re entering a hairpin, downshifting from 4^th to 2^nd, blipping the throttle, fighting the wheel, hitting the apex, flooring it and shifting up. Really makes me like I’m really behind the wheel. There should be an official GT: 5 wheel coming from Logitech in conjunction with the games release. You can play around with the physics level, turn off the assists and try out different tire settings in the menu. Putting the physics to professional setting will really test your abilities. The much heavier Nissan GT-R is much more difficult to handle on a twisty track like Suzaka when compared to the much smaller Daihatsu. So naturally throwing your GT-R full speed into a hairpin will cause all the momentum to shift to the front of the car resulting in much longer braking time and you taking a much wider turn. With a light weight car like the Daihatsu you can brake much later. The physics engines ensure the cars react as they would in real life. Cars roll realistically in the bends and you can see momentum shift when you accelerate and brake due to the G meter present. It’s all really quite well done. With rumored damage modeling and weather effects coming to the series we’ll finally see how everything comes together.