The original Gear.Club Unlimited was lucky. It wasn't exactly an exceptional arcade racing game, but it had the fortune of being one of the first non-kart arcade racers on the Nintendo Switch that pulled off a decent experience. The success of the Switch and subsequent ports of older arcade racing games on the platform meant that the reviews for Gear.Club Unlimited 2 weren't so forgiving. The game felt lacking in several areas compared to titles that were much older on the system. Gear.Club Unlimited 3 was set to be a more ambitious arcade racer that tried to repeat the success of the first game by arriving early on in the Switch 2's life cycle. However, like the second game, it's overshadowed by another Grid game, Grid Legends on the Switch 2. Now Gear.Club Unlimited 3 faces an even steeper challenge, as it has appeared on the PC, a platform that is host to a giant list of who's who in the arcade racing genre.

The game features a few modes. The first one is a story mode, which has become commonplace in many modern arcade racers. The Gear Club has become a big deal in France, but the idea of international expansion has been floated for a while. Those plans have come to fruition, with Japan as the first location chosen for that international expansion. In an effort to find someone to lead that group, a small competition has been held. You play as a rookie racer who has won the race and a ticket to Japan to start recruiting members and make the Japanese branch of Gear Club as big as its French counterpart.

It's good to have a narrative in a racing game, but this is relatively easy going. Don't expect any sort of rivalries to pop up because everyone is pretty easy going with one another, but there's a slight shift by the game's halfway point. All of the game's scenes, except for the opening, are told in a visual novel style with loads of text and painted still pictures of the characters speaking. The story is just a vehicle for the next racing event, but considering how many other racing games have stories that seem more important than they should be, this is a welcome change of pace.

For the most part, your gameplay time is going to be spent in a variety of racing events, some of which require you to have a specific car manufacturer or class to participate. You have standard races, where you start at the back of the pack and need to move ahead either in lapped races or checkpoint ones. You have the equivalent of time trial races, where you must reach the end of a course before time runs out. You also have a duel mode, where you face one other opponent, but both of you have energy meters. You deplete your opponent's energy by driving ahead of them and maintaining a lead, but the energy is only taken away at certain timed intervals. The energy amount is dictated by how far you are from your opponent and vice versa. It's reminiscent of Tokyo Xtreme Racer in a way but a tad more forgiving, since the energy drain occurs at intervals rather than immediately.

The new racing mode is Highway Rush. You have an energy meter much like in Duel mode, but there are no opposing racers, and the meter is constantly depleting. You need to reach the end of the course before time runs out, but the only way to refill any energy is to perform tricks, such as dodging cars or getting close to them without touching them as you pass. Racing cleanly and racing at top speed give you a good chunk of health at a time. The concept is neat, mostly because it is different from the standard racing while also emphasizing your need for precision, which isn't a strong suit for most arcade racing games.

Between races is your garage, which acts like a glorified menu, as you'll use the space to jump into a menu of available races or switch between countries when the story calls for it. You're free to decorate it, but your main objective is to outfit the place with upgrade bays, so you can tweak your car. You can switch vehicles when the race requires it or when you can't put any more upgrades into your given car. While it would be faster to have a more straightforward menu for these kinds of things, it is neat to see your club headquarters as a more tangible thing.

For the most part, the racing itself is fine. Handling is decent enough, but there is no consistent way to drift. Opponent racers tend to exhibit a good deal of rubber-banding, but the difficulty isn't high enough to where the races become a challenge. There's an emphasis on trying to race clean, but the only penalty for hitting walls and other cars is a reduction in the rewards you gain. All of the non-story-related races can be repeated for more rewards, so the penalty isn't so severe. The whole thing doesn't feel all that exciting thanks to the lack of any defining feature for the game, which stops you from trying to sit down for a long game session. It's fine if you're playing in bursts with a few races at a time, but the tedium sets in quickly after that, since there's nothing to compel you to keep going until you lose track of time.

There isn't too much beyond the story mode. Just about every type of race features in the story mode is present, but there's a wider selection of cars. The major addition is the presence of a time trial mode, which contains an online leaderboard, but you'll find said leaderboard to be sparsely populated even though the game has been out for a while now. The lack of a cross-platform version of the leaderboard explains its emptiness, since that should've been more populated with Switch 2 players. There's also a free roam mode, but since you're able to drive along those tracks with no opposition or time limit, you won't return to the mode often. Local multiplayer is available for most of the race types, but you'll want to ensure both players are on controllers, since the keyboard is seen as the primary control scheme when you leave multiplayer. The only way to regain gamepad support is to reboot the whole game. Meanwhile, there is no online multiplayer available.

Graphically, Gear.Club Unlimited 3 is good enough. The car models are fine, but don't expect much in terms of particle effects. Things like smoke are barely visible. The environments are mostly fine, but there is a visible line where the details start to pop up, especially for shadows and other small elements, like the fans in tunnels. You aren't going to notice them in the heat of a race, but they are difficult to ignore once you see it happening. The game's lighting is neat, especially during highway battles, but there are instances when the lights can misbehave, such as seeing sparkles of colored fluorescent lights appear opposite the light source, making it feel like you're getting graphical corruption.

The PC version of the game features one big graphical enhancement: path tracing. That should be a bigger deal, but its execution leaves much to be desired. First, the path tracing only applies to the garage and car dealership, so having this enabled doesn't affect the game's actual performance when racing. Second, the actual path tracing effect seems to be broken. The game looks fuzzier with this on, and there's loads of ghosting on the screen. Finally, the frame rate on these sections takes a nosedive even if you have the graphical effect turned on. Even if you're using something like a RTX 5090 with DLSS on, the frame rate dips so low that navigation in these spaces becomes a chore. No matter your hardware, you're much better off turning off the graphical effect, since there's no real benefit to it.

On the audio side, things are just fine. The sound effects are good enough, while the music is also decent. There's nothing licensed, but the game tries to deliver generic tunes from different genres, and the music fits in as good background noise. There's no voice acting, which is a shame, but there's nothing in the story that you'll really miss.

Those planning to play the game on a Linux PC will find that the game actually runs, even though it uses Easy Anti-Cheat for the online leaderboard mode. The performance matches that of a Windows PC with no other issues present. On the Steam Deck, the game defaults to a Low preset all around with XeSS with the upscaler set to Balanced, a 40fps cap. The game runs well with this, hitting that cap just fine with a good picture quality all around. The battery life hits around two-and-a-half hours with a full charge on the LCD version of the Deck, which is good enough for a game that's all about quick races.

Gear.Club Unlimited 3 comes across as a middle-of-the-road arcade racing game. The arcade style handling and tracks are fine, while the car selection is good albeit tiny when compared to the competition. The story and focus on events are great, but the pacing really wants you to play this game in short spurts versus extended sessions. The circumstances create a game that works fine as an in-between title but not as your main racing game, especially when the platform has a ton of better racing titles.

Score: 6.5/10