Gear.Club Unlimited 3 Review – Review
Stuck in neutral.
Racing games have always lived and died on their “feel”. You can have all the licensed cars in the world, shiny bodywork, and winding roads, but if the act of driving doesn’t keep you hooked, it starts to fall away pretty quickly. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 understands part of this. The racing itself is fine. The problem is that almost everything around it struggles to make an impression.
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 gives you access to over 40 cars from big-name manufacturers like BMW, Porsche, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Honda, Alfa Romeo, Bugatti, etc. There are 50 tracks to work through, a story mode based around Japanese car culture, and a decent amount of customisation options to play around with. On paper, that sounds like a pretty great package from developer Eden Games. In practice, it never quite finds the spark to bring those pieces together well.
This is a simple, easy-to-understand racer. You pick an event, hit the track, try to finish first, earn rewards, upgrade your car, and move on to the next race. It does the bare minimum you expect from a racer. The cars handle well, the racing is approachable to all levels of experience, and there is some enjoyment to be found in shaving seconds off corners or pushing your way through a pack of cars. If all you want is to drive, take part in races, and build out a garage of recognisable cars, Gear.Club Unlimited 3 does that. But that’s also where the ceiling is.
The career mode is essentially race to race, with static story scenes in between. These screens feature cartoon-style character designs and text boxes, and there’s zero energy to any of it. I appreciate the attempt to build a story, but it never grabbed me. It’s essentially there to give the next race a bit of context before you get back behind the wheel. Then again, though, what else do you expect? It’s a racing game. Maybe I’ve been spoiled with my experience in other racing franchises, but at the same time, I don’t need a dramatic, emotional, Oscar-worthy story, I just wanted something with some personality!
That lack of personality is the game’s biggest issue. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 isn’t broken, and it’s not a bad racing experience. It just feels empty. You get nice cars that all feel a little different from one another, decent locations to drive through, and a good amount of track variety, but there’s very little atmosphere holding it all together.
Visually, things are pretty great. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 offers a choice between performance mode and graphics mode. I mostly played in graphics mode because I wanted to see what the game could do, and to be fair, it looks great. The cars are nicely detailed, the environments can look sharp, and there are moments where the lighting and track design do make a strong impression. However, when there is a lot happening on screen, the odd stutter or frame drop becomes noticeable. It was never bad enough to ruin the actual gameplay for me, but it does take you out of the racing immersion when it happens.
The load times are harder to ignore. For a game built around short races, waiting around between events slows everything down more than it should. Worth noting that flipping to performance mode reduces the time here, but it’s still a fair wait. Racing games work best for me when they keep momentum going: one more race, one more upgrade, one more attempt at first place, or at least an engaging cut scene ready when the next race is loading. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 keeps interrupting that rhythm with a static screen and flickering logo. It’s not unbearable, but it is noticeable, especially when so much of the game is built around jumping quickly from one short race to the next.
There are some other small frustrations too. The AI can feel a little too eager to catch up at times, making some races feel less like competition and more like the game quietly pulling rivals back into contention, and then giving you a chance when you fall behind. The highway events add some variety, and dodging traffic does offer a different kind of challenge, but even these races do not completely shake the sense of repetition. Crashing only slows you down, and shows no physical wear and tear on your car.
Despite the frustrations, I can’t say I had an awful time with it. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is a fine racing game. Sometimes, fine is enough. If you are looking for a straightforward racer on Switch 2, with real cars, simple progression, and no desire to think too hard beyond braking at the right time and taking the next corner cleanly, this works. There is definitely fun here in short bursts – especially in some simple couch co-op action.
For its cost, though, it’s difficult to recommend this. The handling is decent, the cars look good, and the track list gives you enough to do, but the slow loading, flat presentation, occasional performance hiccups, and lack of life stop it from becoming anything more than serviceable.
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is the kind of game I would recommend only with a big, big asterisk. If you just want a realistic looking racer, and to race around and do very little else, you will probably get some enjoyment out of it. If you want a racer that gives you a real reason to keep coming back beyond simply unlocking the next event, this will leave you wanting a lot more.
