I'm not liking Cape Ring. From the gameplay videos, it just looks boring. There's nothing iconic about it the way there is with Grand Valley. It reminds me of something out of Forza with the way the whole circuit has been designed so that all configurations can be run as one long circuit. The opposing hairpins just look silly, though the south circuit doesn't look too bad. I'm also not a fan of Special Stage Route 7. It doesn't look like there's anything too challenging in it; it's just flat out. Kind of like AVUS, but a little bendier.
That said, I'm liking Chamonix and the Eiger Trails. One of my biggest issues in GT4 was the difficulty curve in rally mode, particularly on the snow. You'd have simple and straightforward circuits like Ice Arena and Swiss Alps, but then you're racing on Grand Canyon and Chamonix, which were much longer and much more difficult and there were no real intermediate circuits between them. I suppose Cathederal Rocks and Tahiti Maza blunted the impact between Swiss Alps and Grand Canyon, but to go from Ice Arena straight to Chamonix - possibly the most difficult circuit in the game - was just madness. It's nice to see some increasingly-longer variants of both Eiger and the new Chamonix.
I also have to say, I'm disappointed by some of the configurations on hand. Particularly with Le Mans. I'm all for weather and day/night cycles, but some of the other layouts only have minor difference between them, and I can't imagine they'd be altogether noticed by the casual gamer. It feels like Polyphony wasted disc space including them. I think my issue with the sheer number of confiurations with little to no variation is that a lot of the circuits are going to be used over and over again from event to event. It was always annoying in GT4 when you went into an event and found you had to do Motegi East and/or Tsukuba again, despite having just completed them in the past two events. I'd honestly rather see Polyphony cut the Le Mans 2005 circuit out in favour of resurrecting Special Stage Route 11, or something else that got cut.
