I absolutely love the gameplay of Gran Turismo, and I love the visuals, and I love the online Sport mode. It's undoubtedly the best sim racing game I've ever played.

That said, there are a few things that make this game harder to recommend to everyone than I'd like.

First, and this is inexcusable, Gran Turismo 7 is mostly a single-player game, but it requires an internet connection to talk to their servers at all times to actually play the game. No big deal, you've got internet, right? Well, the game has been unplayable for about 24 hours at this point because of a bug in a recent update that made them take the servers offline. No access to online races during this time is annoying but understandable, but not letting me play the game at all is absolutely asinine and incredibly user-hostile.

This requirement should be removed from the game.

Second, while I've managed to earn enough in-game money to buy all the cars I want for races in the career mode, every single purchase in the game includes a link to the PlayStation store to buy more credits with real money. Not the end of the world, except the in-game dealerships have "rare" cars that become available for a few days and then disappear for god knows how long. There are also "invitations" you get that let you buy really expensive cars until a set date, and then those cars go away for some indeterminate amount of time.

Basically, the game puts pressure on you to buy really expensive cars in small time windows where you may not have the money on hand to get them, so the only way to get that car for months is to spend real money on them. I haven't spent any real money on cars yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time.

And third, the online Sport mode, which I love overall, really needs to have at least 1-2 daily races that don't allow for tuning of cars. Each race I go into has at least one person who has figured out a tuning method that makes their car notably faster than everyone else on the grid and they're just unstoppable. This problem seems to be improving a bit this week, but most of us don't have time to figure out the optimum tuning settings, and we often don't have a chance on track against those who do. This isn't the end o the world, but it would be nice to be able to jump into a race and know that people ahead of you are driving better rather than wondering if they just Googled a better tuning setup than you.

Anyway, Gran Turismo 7 is brilliant in many more ways than the reasons above, but these are some pretty dramatic blights on what would otherwise be a damn near-perfect racing game.