Gear.Club Unlimited 3 Review
The Nintendo Switch was not home to many great racing games, especially ones that didn’t feature karts and moustachioed drivers. So far, that’s continued to play out for the Switch 2, but there are some key signs of change with the arrival of GRID Legends last month. Drafting directly behind it is Gear Club Unlimited 3, an arcade/sim-cade racer that also boasts its own storyline, licensed vehicles and updated visuals, hoping to snatch its own place on the podium. While it puts up a valiant effort, it feels like it’ll remain firmly in the middle of the pack.
As we’re seeing more and more on Switch 2, Gear.Club Unlimited 3 gives you the choice between a 30fps Graphics option and a considerably smoother Performance mode with a 60fps refresh rate. Ideally, racing games need to be 60fps – though 30fps is fine if its stable – and it’s definitely snappier and more responsive. The Graphics option here targets 30fps, but it does not manage it by quite some margin. Stutters and lag happen throughout races in this setting, so much so, that I’d say it’s currently unusable. It doesn’t really seem to make all that much difference to the visuals, either, other than the quality of tyre smoke at the start of races.
In the world of Gear.Club, winning is everything. The story mode sees you joining the organisation as a rookie, before trouncing one of the old pros and stealing his slot on the tour to Japan. Thankfully, everyone is thoroughly amiable, and he comes along as your mentor instead, narrowly avoiding some genuinely interesting conflict and drama. All the story dialogue is told via text boxes and static character art, which serves to emphasise the game’s budget leanings, while the suit and shirt-wearing bigwigs feel completely out of place in a tournament of underground racers. The story is, at best, a fairly forgettable frame to the racing action. At worst, it’s just explaining the next menu you’ve unlocked.
The cars make a better first impression. They are extremely well modelled, shining and glistening in their metallic glory, and striking a tone that will have you feeling pretty positive about Gear.Club Unlimited 3’s chances, though with a roster of 39 cars, it’s relatively slim pickings.
Actually racing them isn’t so positive. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 offers a couple of options to tailor your experience, with different levels of brake assist and anti-skid. Whichever option you go for, the cars are relatively well grounded, and pretty reliable in the way they manoeuvre, if a bit lifeless, though there’s still a nagging sense of worry and uncertainty if you go for Expert settings and turn off anti-skid.
Where it comes unstuck is drifting. At no point does this become natural, easy, or enjoyable, and you’ll find you can launch it around curves like a terrible NASCAR driver without losing too much time. That’s all exacerbated by the lack of analogue triggers. We can lay some of that at Nintendo’s door, but when GRID Legends gives you right analogue stick throttle control, and supports the Gamecube controller’s analogue triggers, there’s little excuse for not having it in place.
It just doesn’t come together very well. Rubber banding in races sees you fly past the entire pack, only to have them inexplicably reappear in your mirrors and pass you at the last moment. There’s a Kudos-like scoring system for keeping it clean, and achieving various other feats of vehicular control, but it feels pretty perfunctory and uninvolved.
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is at its best when it’s trying to emulate Tokyo Xtreme Racer. Battles and duels that take place on packed Japanese highways are the most fun events here, and nipping your way through traffic is a blast. Well, it’s a blast till you clip somebody and invariably end up facing the wrong way.
Upgrading your Club is a pleasant little diversion. You’ve got a massive garage to work with, filling it with technicians as well as designing areas to relax in, and stuffing them full of arcade machines. Upgrading your cars is tied to which workshops you’ve unlocked, and then adding engineers to unlock higher tiers within each one, and that’s interesting enough, giving you a reason to take part in an additional race or two, to fill things out.
The problem is that the engineers and upgrades dry up at points, with little to do but persevere with the ‘story’ mode, and just keep on racing across a map that you can barely tell has changed.
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is a largely solo experience, with the main story mode taking you from a rookie to the leader of the Gear Club Japan arm of the racing company, while taking in time racing across the roads of France. It’s a shame that progress feels so slow, and the upgrade system so lacklustre, because there are elements of the game that work pretty well.
There is a Free-Roam mode too, which I hoped might suddenly turn Unlimited 3 into an open-world racer. Unfortunately, it just lets you – or you and a friend – drive the tracks without any constraints, or you can do some two-player racing, which is a nice thing to have. Being able to explore the world might have been more impactful if there were more sights to see, beyond the occasional train racing by.
On top of everything else, the music is horrendously repetitive. I managed about an hour before I turned it off in the races, and maybe a couple more before wanting to cull it in the menus too. Besides that, the game hard-crashed at points too, dumping you back to the Switch 2’s main menu. It’s just another thing to chip away at Gear.Club Unlimited 3’s potential.