Gear.Club Unlimited 3 (NS2) - Review
by Evan Norris , posted 4 days ago / 1,897 Views
In less than a year, Switch 2 has already assembled an impressive catalog of arcade racing games. The system launched with Mario Kart World and Fast Fusion, and in the subsequent months played host to Kirby Air Riders and Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, among others. When it comes to racing sims, though, the system hasn't achieved the same level of momentum. Looking to reverse that trend is Gear.Club Unlimited 3, a sim racer from developer Eden Games and publisher Nacon. With its semi-realistic physics and licensed cars, it's an atypical Switch 2 exclusive.
The heart of Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is its story mode, a lengthy campaign that travels back and forth between France and Japan. The story begins in the French Riviera, where Marc Beaumont, founder of the racing club GearClub, has assembled a group of up-and-coming racers to help expand the organization overseas. The first stop: Japan. After you prove your driving skills, Marc dispatches you and his right-hand man Louis to Japan to build a new club from scratch. Soon enough, you're working with local racers and gearheads to secure cars, parts, financial support, and clout. Then it's back to France to convince investors, then back to Japan to find new partners, and so on.
This all sounds exciting and engaging on paper, but in practice it's rather dull. Part of this is the presentation: Marc, Louis, and other NPCs appear as static, voiceless, lifeless character portraits. And part is that you're an employee, working toward your boss' goals. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 would be more interesting if this was your dream, and you had to start as a lowly street racer and work your way up to club owner. As it stands, you're more of a gun-for-hire bankrolled by a millionaire.
Another issue with Story Mode is a feeling of monotony. While the campaign has 50 race tracks and hundreds of racing opportunities, they have a way of blurring together. Rarely does a race feel like an event. The competition is typically nameless and faceless, and there are only tenuous connections between your achievements on the road and the economic progress of your club. And without big personalities and high stakes, the twisting country roads of France and Japan all start to look alike. Now, to be fair, there are some notable exceptions. At one point, in chapter five, you get behind the wheel of a Cayman GT4 and race against a hot air balloon, believe it or not. There's an extraordinary moment where you exit a long, dark tunnel into a banking curve and see the balloon, emblazoned with the Porsche logo, rising to your right. Unfortunately, these special challenges are few and far between.
The most interesting part of Story Mode, unexpectedly, happens in the downtime between races. Here you can customize your club HQ, organize your fleet of cars, and install, develop, and staff workshops, which open up new upgrades. While the interface and layout is a little clunky, the light simulation and role-playing elements help elevate a pedestrian campaign. Using credits earned from races, you can enhance each workshop, gaining access to better parts. And you can even assign workers to each facility, which will reduce costs and improve performance. Alternatively, you could deploy those staff members to the car dealer, earning yourself credits for each car placed in a parking space, or to the world map, granting yourself +10% credits after a race when finishing with a perfect Unlimited Score.
Unlimited Score is the philosophical heart of Gear.Club Unlimited 3. In each race, you have an Unlimited meter, which fills when you complete perfect sections, overtake rivals, and maintain your top speed for a certain duration, but empties when you run into obstacles, clip cars, and drive off road. Depending on the fullness of the meter when you cross the finish line, you'll earn a multiplier on the material rewards. Thus, the game rewards clean racing, in addition to crossing the finish line in first place.
This dynamic is most obvious in the game's finest contribution to the Gear.Club series: Highway Rush. In this new type of race, you must beat the clock on a crowded highway. In order to prevail, you must predict car trajectories, change lanes with perfect timing, and swerve between slower-moving vehicles. And you'll fill your Unlimited meter for every near-miss you make. It's thrilling to weave in and out of traffic, narrowly avoiding the cars around you. When Highway Rush combines with Duel, another race type where you must keep ahead of a single rival in order to wear down their health meter, the results are even better.
Highway Rush and Duel are also available in Free Play (which supports both single-player and multiplayer) along with several other modes: Race, Time Trial, and Free Roam. Don't get too excited about Free Roam; it's not an open world exploration mode, but rather the option to drive across race tracks at your leisure without any timers or laps. Free Play, in general, is a nice addition. You can choose from 50 tracks across France and Japan, set the number and difficulty of CPU drivers, and introduce different weather effects. For highway races, you can also alter traffic density.
That said, there are a couple of issues. For starters, multiplayer is limited to only two local players. You can't share the action with four people at a time, and you can't play online at all. For another, the split-screen setup is vertical only. I would have loved the option to divide the screen horizontally.
Whether you play solo or with friends, you'll have to make an important technological decision before racing: quality mode or performance mode. Quality will deliver up to 1080p while docked, but will cap the action at 30 fps. Performance, meanwhile, will deliver a lovely 60 fps while docked, but suffers from lower resolution and obvious pop-in and flickering. You're better off going with Performance, despite the visual downgrade. In general, Gear.Club Unlimited 3 isn't the most beautiful game, although the cars look quite good (and sound good, too).
Speaking of cars, this latest installment in the Gear.Club franchise offers an eclectic, but undersized assortment of vehicles. There are some amazing cars here, from Alfa Romeo, Pagani, BMW, Bugatti, Porsche, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, and Honda. But there are only 39 of them (42 if you invest in the Performance Cars DLC). That's a low number for a sim racer in 2026.
The good news is that each car handles as it should. The Mazda MX-5 is appropriately light and nimble, while the Bentley Bacalar takes sharp turns like Jabba the Hutt's sail barge. In general, the driving mechanics in the game are reliable, although not as refined as other modern racers. The lack of analog triggers doesn't help.
In the end, Gear.Club Unlimited 3 isn't going to make Switch 2 owners forget about Mario Kart World or Kirby Air Riders, or inspire PlayStation and Xbox players to move on from Gran Turismo and Forza. Despite some successes — workshop upgrades and highway duels chief among them — it's a middling sim racer with a monotonous (albeit substantial) story mode, limited multiplayer options, and subpar visuals. There are better racing games out there.
VGChartz Verdict
5.5
Acceptable
This review is based on a digital copy of Gear.Club Unlimited 3 for the NS2, provided by the publisher.
