Racing games on Nintendo consoles have always been a bit of a weird thing. There have always been the odd arcade racing game and a few semi-simulation style games over the years, but Nintendo consoles have never really had a full-fledged simulation game the likes of something like Gran Turismo.
Ever since the release of Gran Turismo on the PS1 Nintendo has kind of ignored the genre, putting all its eggs in the basket known as Mario kart. And to be fair, that’s not a bad move. You have to know your strengths and Nintendo knows that the simulation market really isn’t their forte, and so they haven’t enticed first or second-party developers to focus on the genere. It’s pretty well locked up with Gran Turismo and now the Forza series.
But that isn’t to say that people don’t want to see a proper racing game on a Nintendo console. Mario Kart is absolutely a blast to play but there are times when you want a simulation style experience, especially one you can actually take on the go now with a Nintendo Switch. Why more companies haven’t attempted to bring a sim racing title to the switch is beyond me, but we do have one developer that’s making strides to see that racing sims are alive on the switch.
What’s interesting is that the team behind behind Gear Club Unlimited 2 are mobile developers porting their racing series from the mobile market to the Nintendo Switch. Last year saw Gear Club Unlimited grace the Switch and was received with middling reviews at best. Still, it’s a pretty good place to start and left a lot of room for improvement, and now with the Gear Club Unlimited 2 the studio is taking aim again with a more developed and robust experience.
Gear Club Unlimited 2 presents us with 250 different races and 50 licensed cars to drive. This isn’t going to impress Gran Turismo or Forza fans but it’s not bad and shows the team is growing beyond their original outing. The star of the show is the more developed career mode that mimics the likes of something like Forza. It’s not going to win any awards and has you in the shoes of a rookie driver making his way onto a team and building to be the best that he can be as he advances his career. It’s not breaking any new ground but it’s a competent experience on the whole.
But the mobile roots show in all sorts of little ways. Your racing team is all made up of animated drawn characters and there are no voice samples to accompany any of the text on screen, which is a shame as your friends are pretty neat. Character animations are also really, really poor and make you wonder why non-essential models are used for characters around your overly complicated mechanic shop.
Gear Club Unlimited 2 would be much better served if they just stuck to the animated characters and left out any actual models. This probably isn’t such a big deal on a tiny screen but when you’re blowing this up on a 50-inch TV in living room, these details begin to get more noticeable. It’s probably not the best look when a mechanic walks around in your garage as you’re working on your car and looks like he was pulled straight from the PlayStation 2; and not one of the good PS2 games.
Your shop is also one of the main annoyances I have with the experience. The game incorporates a building feature that has you upgrading your garage. In theory it makes sense, adding new features as you earn race cash, but it feels tacked on. Unlike other games where you simply upgrade your care as you earn cash, Gear Club Unlimited 2 requires you select your car and then drag it to a corresponding area of your shop.
This is a very mobile experience that probably works smoothly and quickly on a small phone, but using a controller just feels clunky. You end up spending far too much time in your shop simply moving your car from one area to another, and probably even longer if you move a car to the wrong area like I do as I forget what each area does. Just give us a single screen and let us buy upgrades like Forza does.
But were a simulation game really thrives or dies is in its handling and gameplay mechanics, not so much on its graphics and extras. You come into a game like this for the realism first and foremost and Gear Club Unlimited 2 sort of brings that to the table. The driving isn’t as tight or well-developed for the vehicle on display as it is in something like Gran Turismo or Forza, but it’s also not as generic and stock as some of the lower fare you’d find in the genre or in the eShop. It floats somewhere in the line between authentic racing and control and forgiving arcade-like driving.
If you’ve been a Nintendo die hard, then something like Gear Club Unlimited 2 is going to feel great in terms of what you want from a simulation racing game, but if you’ve had any experience with the Forza series or the latest Gran Turismo games then you’re going to feel like the experience is a cut down one. While the game claims that each car feels unique to its make and model that’s not quite the case in implementation. More cars than I would have liked feel and react in much the same way, and don’t quite feel like you think they should to their real world counterparts.
Driving controls are also a bit loose in my opinion. The game also introduces some weird lag issues from time to time that really messes with the driving. As someone who lives and dies by his Microsoft sidewinder racing wheel for modern racers on PC, and enjoys the tight controls provided by an Xbox One controller, the controls here on the Nintendo Switch just feel loose and not quite there.
If you’ve played a lot of simulation racing games you’re going to feel that your car is turning a lot later than you would like when you make the movement on the joystick. And this lag permeates into other aspects of Gear Club Unlimited 2. There’s sometimes lag in the menus, there’s lag stutters while racing at odd instances and there’s some really long loading times for such a light experience, some of the longest that I’ve experienced on the Nintendo Switch so far.
This lag makes following the proper racing line much more difficult than it should be early on even when you upgrade you car with all the bells and whistles. It’s not impossible, but it’s something you’re going to have to get used to and it just doesn’t ever feel quite right if you’ve been exposed to other simulation racing titles.
So, don’t expect to go into Gear Club Unlimited 2 and then jump into something like Gran Turismo and expect to be able to handle that sort of experience as these are two very different games, even though they’re both tagged as simulation games. But what really gets me is the lack of options in the racing that you have to play with.
Maybe I’ve become spoiled with so many options, but there’s some basics that I come to expect from a simulation racing game like this. One of the big things are camera choices. You get the traditional overhead view, you also get a pulled back view and you get a view of your hood or bonnet for you European readers. But strangely you don’t get a cockpit view of the car you’re driving.
This might not be a huge deal to a lot of people but as someone who loves the inside of vehicles and craves authenticity, it’s really lacking here. And I, for one, enjoy driving from the cockpit view, especially coming from using a racing wheel and seeing how quickly the model reacts to my movements and comparing lag. Look, I know this is a port of a mobile title but it still feels really lacking to not have that feature in 2018.
As for the gameplay itself, Gear Club Unlimited 2 is pretty hit-or-miss. There are times you’re going to get a really nice frame rates where everything is smooth, clean and enjoyable, and then randomly you’re going to have segments with frame drops and stutters. None of these things I’ve mentioned destroy the game outright, but they do make you feel like if the game had a little more time in development, tweaking some of those small details, we’d have a much more refined and complete experience.
I don’t know how the graphics in the Gear Glub series look on a mobile phone but I’m guessing they look pretty good, especially when you shrink it down to such a small screen. And it works pretty well when you’re in handheld mode on the Nintendo Switch too. But it doesn’t work so well when you’re on a full size television as the graphics aren’t going to win any awards and don’t really show off a Nintendo Switch as a very powerful console.
At the very best Gear Club Unlimited 2 looks like a decent-looking Xbox 360 game. The cars are fairly well detailed and look nice, which is great as that should be the main focus in a simulation racer. The environments on the other hand don’t look very well rendered. Clearly the team had a certain budget to work with and thankfully they did put it into the car models, but if you’re coming from something like the latest Forza Horizon game you’re going to be really disappointed.
And while there are tons of races to be had, they don’t do enough to mix things up. Time Trails are just normal races without being able to slam into each other, Elimination Races are the same with the player in last being removed every thirty seconds or so, and on and on. The career mode is a long one, but you’ll want to play it in chunks so you don’t drive yourself made with repetition.
Sure, other simulation racing games have this problem because the nature of the genre, but while the map here resembles Forza, you can’t actually drive to new races, something that adds to saving that game from falling to the curse of racing monotony. There are lots of different environments to race on too, but again, they don’t feel all that different.
Racing on snow feel a little more slippery, but not enough of a change where you’ll have to really alter how you race. Also, opponent cars on snow look like they are floating above the track as they fly by. Tracks repeat themselves a lot and even when doing a Rally Race and needed a special setup, you still drive the same.
In Forza Horizon 4, racing a car with front wheel drive isn’t a joke. You really need to adjust how you drive and need to change your racing style, most likely taking exhibition races to understand your under/over-steer. With Gear Club Unlimited 2 you get a little wiggle, but I never really needed to adjust how I approached the way I drove. And then there’s the game physics that I question.
Trading paint with another car seems to always put you at a disadvantage. Getting fishtailed will spin you out, and bumping a car will see you lose a fair bit of time and space. This isn’t a big deal, but all those things never seem to be a problem for the A.I. racers. They never fishtail, they smack the wall and not lose placement, and they generally feel like they are playing by different rules.
At the end of the day Gear Club Unlimited 2 is a step up from the previous entry and shows that the team is slowly building a competent sim racer. And that the best way to describe the game –competent. Everything works okay, looks okay, and provides a fair bit of fun. But racing purists are going to stick their noses up at this competent sim racer in a world were the likes of Forza and Gran Turismo exist.
Still, I can recommend Gear Club Unlimited 2 because it does provide a good bit of fun, especially on the go. It feels a little more arcadey than I’d like and lacks basic features we’ve come to expect, but there’s something charming about an underdog title on a system that does not get games like this.
If you can find this on on sale then I’d say jump on it, and I do hope the game does sell so that maybe we can get a complete experience the next time around built from the ground up for the Nintendo Switch.
“Gear Club Unlimited 2 is a competent racing experience, but one that is pretty bare-bones when compared to its contemporaries.”
Final Score:
3/5
*A copy was provided for review”
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