Gran Turismo 7 Is Now The Lowest Scoring Sony Game Ever

Gran Turismo 7 is now Sony’s lowest-scoring game on the website, Metacritic, of all time. An accolade I’m sure Polyphony Digital never thought they’d have.

In my review of Gran Turismo 7, I gave it a high score of 9.5. A well-deserved score at the time of writing. However, pre-launch, the game had no microtransactions. Unfortunately, microtransactions were then implemented into the game once most reviews went live. No matter how much you love this series, which is a very shady and deceptive practice.

We can safely assume this was a coordinated move by Polyphony Digital because the microtransactions made its way into the game via a day one patch. As you can imagine, this didn’t go down well with a lot of fans. Worst still, the most expensive car to buy in-game with real-world money is an eye-watering £160!

Then towards the end of last week, Gran Turismo 7 was offline for over a day. This might not be the worst thing in the world. However, for a game that requires an always-online connection and as a result, locked players out of the vast majority of the game’s modes, this also annoyed a lot of fans that bought the game. This it seems, is where the review bombing began.

As well as addressing the game being offline for over a day, series creator Kazunori Yamauchi released an odd statement. In it, he kinda justified the game’s microtransactions, while at the same time dancing around to why fans weren’t pleased with the practice.

“In GT7 I would like to have users enjoy lots of cars and races even without microtransactions,” said Yamauchi. “At the same time, the pricing of cars is an important element that conveys their value and rarity, so I do think it’s important for it to be linked with the real world prices.”

He continued: “I want to make GT7 a game in which you can enjoy a variety of cars in lots of different ways, and if possible, would like to try to avoid a situation where a player must mechanically keep replaying certain events over and over again.”

So, when you consider all the factors that have agitated GT7 fans lately, how low is Gran Turismo 7s Metacritic user score? Well, at the time of writing it’s a very lowly 1.9! Ouch!

All this is a shame because as reflected in my review, Gran Turismo 7 is a fantastic racing game. While I don’t usually agree with reviewing bombing, fans have every right to be frustrated and this is certainly a way to get attention.

Hopefully, Polyphony Digital can right this wrong and rebuild trust with the fans. Will that happen? Only time will tell. Gran Turismo 7 is available now for PS4 and PS5.

Featured Image Credit: Polyphony Digital