Gear.Club Unlimited 3 Review

Almost a decade ago, I read about a game called Gear.Club for iOS. On mobile, I didn’t enjoy many racing games because they usually annoy me with freemium nonsense, and I didn’t stick with the Gear.Club franchise much until the Apple Arcade release, Gear.Club Stradale, which also lost me with its progression, but I was impressed with the controls and visuals.

I vaguely remember trying out Gear.Club Unlimited on my friend’s Nintendo Switch, but I was not impressed with the visuals compared to mobile racers back then. Eden Games always delivered a good feeling racer, though, but the progression or content is what used to lose me. Fast forward to today and Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is out as a launch exclusive on Nintendo Switch 2. It is also a premium (all things considered) priced game. I thought this could potentially be a turning point for Eden Games’ Gear.Club series, and what better way to showcase it all than the Switch 2? Unfortunately, it is hard to recommend Gear.Club Unlimited 3 right now thanks to a combination of visual issues and a lack of content to justify the asking price.

Gear.Club Unlimited 3 takes you to both Japan and France. It ships with the usual race options, a story mode, and a new Highway mode that delivers arcade-like challenges. Unfortunately, there is no online multiplayer included right now. Even the recent GRID Legends: Deluxe Edition port didn’t include it, but it shipped with a massive amount of content across tracks and cars, something Gear.Club Unlimited 3 does not have. It is weird to see a new racing game arrive with under 50 cars, but I appreciate the work that went into the car models and controls.

I’m a bit surprised at how easy the story mode felt with a confusing progression system, given the level of challenge offered. The customization options also feel a bit tacked on. I’m not opposed to easier games, but I feel like the AI in the story mode just can’t handle some situations. Some difficulty options or sliders to tweak this would have gone a long way.

The tracks are currently very lacking when it comes to visuals during the daytime. Normally, I’d be ok with some visual cuts in the environment on tracks, but Gear.Club Unlimited 3 has multiple visual issues while racing that are very distracting. This involves ghosting, bad motion blur, flickering in the distant foliage in front of the car, and more. Even in the game’s quality mode with a 30 frames per second target, I noticed some of the flickering and the motion blur felt bad. On paper, the tracks are well-designed, but the visual issues made it so I wasn’t really enjoying my time with it, both docked and handheld.

Speaking of docked and handheld, Gear.Club Unlimited 3 has a quality and performance mode available in both modes. You can only adjust this from the main settings and not while driving in-game. The quality mode has trouble maintaining a perfectly-paced 30 frames per second, and the performance mode looks very blurry docked. In handheld, I got used to the image quality, but the flickering foliage and blur were annoying. As of this writing, there is no option to turn off any of the post-processing. You can only adjust the visual mode between quality and performance.

If you do plan on getting it, I recommend sticking to handheld since docked felt worse to me. One other technical issue that annoyed me was the long load times, and I also had the game freeze twice while loading. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is installed on my Switch 2 internal storage as well.

The two aspects of Gear.Club Unlimited 3 that I have enjoyed the most are the music and the implementation of HD rumble. The music is a blend of relaxing lounge music with some upbeat tunes in races and menus, while the rumble feels very immersive.

I saw “Free Roam” available as a race option, but it simply lets you race the same tracks without any restrictions, and not an actual free-roaming mode, which only added to my disappointment.

I hope Eden Games and Nacon don’t give up on this because it is a solid foundation for the series and a lot better than what I experienced of Gear.Club on mobile or the Switch port. Working on it leading into the launch on other platforms would definitely help with potentially bringing in cross-platform online multiplayer.

Gear.Club Unlimited 3 offers a solid core racing experience, but it suffers from poor visuals, performance issues, some visual glitches, and a scarcity of content to justify the asking price. It is even harder to recommend Gear.Club Unlimited 3 in a post-GRID Legends: Deluxe Edition world on Nintendo Switch 2. There is potential here, but too many caveats for it to be even close to an easy recommendation.

Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review Copy Provided by Nacon

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