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A fun and colourful but graphically limited arcade racer.
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 from developer Eden Games and publisher Nacon follows it’s predecessor with a similar gameplay loop but expands the locales with bright and colour Japanese and French landscapes. It is a decent arcade racer with lots of tracks, a good amount of cars and customization but is hindered by some muddy graphics and poor performance.
Graphics and sound
The game takes you to coastal roads of France and the cities and mountain passes of Japan. The races in Japan are colourful and vibrant with lush cherry blossoms. France is picturesque with sunset races along the ocean and through hilly countryside. Both locations are exaggerated versions of the countries but are represented well. The Tokyo express way could be brighter though. In real life it can be very vibrant at night, in this it’s too dark and seeing cars ahead of you is tricky at times. Tracks are detailed with lots of trackside decorations. Details at a distance get muddy and don’t appear well lit which can look ugly at times. The cars do look great though and are highly detailed. Overall it’s an ok looking game that’s held up by the colourful atmosphere but you can tell it comes from more mobile gaming roots.
Performance is not great with visuals like this. There have been much better looking games that perform much better unfortunately. On a mid-tier system with medium-high details you will get mostly 60 fps with dips. DLSS and FSR helps a bit but the visuals get too smeary. The best results for decent performance and image quality were from native resolution and TAA. There have been some improvements with the latest updates but there is room for improvement. One weird quirk is when in the cockpit view the tachometer, speedometer, and gear info hud elements are missing, so it’s hard to see what gear your in, your speed, or what revs you’re at. The steering wheel blocks a lot of the dash board info so a hud is necessary. Other graphical issues are visual pop-in for distant objects sudden lighting changes around the track.
The cars all sound good and distinct, nothing noteworthy or surprising. The music is fine as well, though it gets repetitive after a few races.
Gameplay
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 consists of two game modes, career and free play, both with a bunch of race types including standard races, time attack, highway rush, and duels.
Time attack is you against clock with time running down. Finish before the time runs out and you win.
Highway rush is like time attack with a bar that ticks down but increases as you maintain high speeds or have near misses with other cars. If you collide with other cars you loose time on the bar. The other modes are your standard racing game types.
One highlight are the one on one duels. The duels are a race with a fighting game like system similar to Tokyo Xtreme Racer. When you are ahead of your opponent their a part of their health bar lowers, the farther ahead you are the more health gets taken away. After a little bit a countdown starts, if you are still ahead when the countdown ends the health gets permanently removed. Your car can loose health as well if you hit walls, barriers or other cars. For duels you get to race on the normal road tracks or on the highways with traffic.
Repeat until all of their health is gone. It’s an interesting mechanic that could have been fleshed out more. There’s no real consequence of driving dirty other than to stay ahead. If you’re ahead, your health doesn’t drop significantly when driving poorly.
Career mode includes all of the game types in a chapter based story. The story is presented in visual novel style between races with drawn character portraits on screen with the text of what they’re saying, though you don’t have dialog choices or any time of interaction other than racing against them. The presentation is nice and stylized enough to fit the rest of the game’s atmosphere. The story is basic and boils down to a rich bearded guy sees your potential and hires you to race for him. It’s not unwelcome but nothing too memorable.
During the career you get to build your garage with stations to upgrade your cars. You have the option for performance upgrades as well as aesthetic upgrades like car lighting, bumpers, side skirts, spoilers, etc. Occasionally you will receive staff for your garage which you can put into a station for extra performance upgrades or discounts. For each race you earn parts and money for the upgrades, you can also purchase new cars from the dealership.
For the main story races you’ll play a variety of the race types mentioned above as well as events that unlock during a chapter. The events use the same race types as story mode but you can play them as many times as you want to earn resources and money for upgrades. This is where the game gets grindy. For some of the main story races you’ll need a powerful enough car or a certain type of car to win so you’ll need to earn enough resources for upgrades, and the amount you get for each race is a bit meagre. The game could have been a bit more generous in the rewards given out.
The variety of race types and amount of tracks to play is good and keeps the career mode somewhat varied even if does become a slight grindfest.
Free play allows you to setup a custom race with just you or in split screen with another player. You have all of the race types including a time trial mode called Endless mode, tracks, and cars to choose from here. You don’t need to unlock anything in single player, everything is available at the start, plus your modified cars from the story mode.
Content, cars and tracks
For content you get 50 tracks split between Japan and France and 39 cars for the standard edition. The deluxe edition adds an extra 3 cars. For cars you’ll get tuners like the Nissan GT-R R35, Nissan 370Z, Honda Civic Type R, and super cars like the Koenigsegg Agera RS, Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport, McLaren 720S, Pagani Huayra Roadster. As well, there’s cars from Porsche, Subaru, Bentley, Lotus, and RUF.
During all races you get a score by filling of your “Unlimited” metre. At the end of you the race you get bonus resources based on how full the metre is. You’ll fill it up quicker if you drive cleanly, drift, have close calls with traffic, and other cool racing moves. You’ll see points get added to your score but you can’t really see how it’s affecting your total score and the “Unlimited” metre. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter as you’ll only get a measly bonus in the end, plus you’ll have to grind anyway to get more resources.
The arcade nature of the game means you have loads of grip on track but can drift quite easily when the situation requires it. It feels good and responsive to drive with a gamepad. The cars generally handle different from each other and handling can depend heavily on what upgrades you’ve bought. The game handles well and is Gear.Club Unlimited 3’s best quality. It really is fun to drive.
Is Gear.Club Unlimited 3 worth playing?
Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is the best game in the series so far and a far better game than the mobile only micro-transaction infested past versions. The arcade handling feels great, there’s a lot of track and car variety, and the single player is decently involved. The game is brought down however by the poor performance and sometimes muddy graphics. It’s still worth a look though as there aren’t a whole lot of new arcade releases out right now.
Note: This was played on a Windows 11 PC through Steam.
System: AMD Ryzen 5800x, 16 GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060ti, Gamepad
This game was provided free of charge by the publisher for purposes of review. No money was exchanged and the publisher does not have final say in the contents of the review. All opinions are that of the reviewer.