Gear.Club Unlimited - Nostalgic Feel, Modern Gameplay

By Oliver Giles

AVAILABLE ON: Nintendo Switch

Microsoft has Forza. Sony has Gran Turismo. Nintendo Has… Gear.Club Unlimited?

When you think of racing games on Nintendo platforms, your mind probably goes straight to the widely successful Mario Kart franchise. Or perhaps if you grew up in the 2000s, you think of the days when titles from franchises such as Need for Speed and Hot Wheels populated the Nintendo racing scene.

Nowadays, however, if you’re looking for a racing game with licensed vehicles on a Nintendo platform, your choices are rather slim.

Enter Gear.Club Unlimited. With a standard digital retail cost of $14.99 US and currently on sale for $2.98, Gear.Club Unlimited comes from the folks over at Eden Games, the same team behind the hugely popular Test Drive Unlimited games.

That being said, Gear.Club Unlimited isn’t quite in the same vein as its more famous predecessors. While the Test Drive Unlimited games strived for realism and free-feeling open-world environments, Gear.Club Unlimited is a much more arcade-style experience.

Composed of primarily short races on narrow, twisting roads at high speeds, players may get some nostalgic flashbacks to Need for Speed’s arcade days or, perhaps, more recently, the Asphalt game franchise. In fact, during my time spent with the game, I often got the feeling that Gear.Club Unlimited felt like a more grounded, less chaotic version of Asphalt 9: Legends, which makes a lot of sense when you realize that both G.CU2 and Asphalt 9 began life as mobile games before making their way to console.

Don’t let the phrase “mobile game” discourage you, however, as all pay-to-win schemes and boosting microtransactions have been removed from the paid console release of the game and have been replaced by a proper leveling and coin-earning system.

As you progress throughout the game, you’ll be given opportunities to upgrade not only your vehicles but your workshops as well. Workshop upgrading, along with playing races in the game’s campaign mode, will provide you with access to faster and better cars, from roaring V8 muscle to cutting-edge hypercars. When you put all the gameplay components together, you end up with a fun progression-based racer with excellent pick-up-and-play value.

The game performs about how you’d expect for a mobile game running on a Nintendo Switch. The graphics aren’t going to blow you away by any means, but I’ve certainly seen worse when it comes to licensed racing games from the late 2010s.

Playing on the Switch OLED Model, the colors are pretty good overall, allowing the cars to stand out enough to be seen against the scenery during a race but not to the point where it takes away from the immersion.

The frame rate stays pretty solid during races, for the most part, posting a well-blended 30 fps with minimal drops that don’t interfere with driving or timing all that much. That being said, there is some occasional lag while navigating the workshop and world map, mainly when the Switch is in docked mode. However, it never seems to be that bothersome.

The controls feel very similar to other arcade racers on the Switch (Asphalt 9, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered, etc.) with fairly sharp turning that, while it may take some getting used to if you’re used to a more realistic experience, helps to add to the arcade feel of the game. And, for those looking to re-immerse themselves in the Wii era of Nintendo racers, the game also offers gyroscopic motion steering control, a feature that works fairly well if you’re into that kind of gameplay.

Overall, Gear.Club Unlimited 2 is a nice little addition to the Switch libraries of anyone looking for a game with excellent pick-up-and-play value due to its short, fast-paced races while also standing out as a fun, nostalgia-feeling arcade racer.