I like a good blat round a track, me, although previous Gran Turismos haven’t exactly left me wetting my pants with glee.

They all seem rather… serious. Game loads, piano starts… errrrrf.

So ‘Sport’ though. Sounds better. More fun, no?

Well yes, if you don’t mind most of the game’s eggs being tossed into the online basket. I don’t, but sometimes I want to drive badly among motorists who don’t get snotty when I use them as a buffer while braking ludicrously late into the inside of the corner.

Online, this kind of approach will easily obliterate your sportsmanship rating, which aims to whittle out the hoons from the rest. This is all very well when it’s clear who’s at fault for twisted metal showering the road. Generally both cars are punished, which won’t impress the racer you push into the verge (believe me).

So GTS looks nice and it sounds great. Where it falls downstairs is the lack of cars. Usually a GT game is swimming in numbers in this respect, but 160 is piffling, really. Tracks also suffer, with a mere 17 locations.

You could argue developers ejected a lot of the baggage to focus on the game mechanics, but this is all very well if the servers are working or your modem isn’t angrily blinking amber. Offline there’s only access to the arcade mode, but if you can’t upload any results, progress in this area isn’t saved, so it’s bloody pointless.

I like Gran Turismo Sport but in many ways it seems a shell of a game compared with its predecessors. There’s a little less of the po-face, granted, but at least that came with po-legs, po-arms and a strapping po-torso.