Eden Games is known for its racing games like Test Drive Unlimited and V-Rally. And this holiday they are filling a niche on Nintendo Switch with Gear.Club Unlimited, a serious racing game for the console/handheld hybrid.
Along with test driving new cars, players can do neat little things like open the hood, trunk, and all of the doors on their potential ride. Each player can visit their own Performance Shop, a nifty little diorama to enhance and display your vehicles for others. You can give your shop swanky themes like posh penthouse or neon bowling alley.
The Performance Shop is also where you upgrade and customize your cars. Construct new stations like a wind tunnel or paint shop and drag your car into them to increase aerodynamics or just change colors. These stations themselves can also be upgraded into more effective forms. Here you can see really granular data that the game’s physics engine produces, like traction coefficient, but it’s also easy enough to just know whether or not a change will make your car go faster.
While real-world car brands like Nissan and Porsche and Dodge can be a little touchy about how video games deform their cars, you can still customize your cars with things like new spoilers and bumpers. But stock models are a fine option, too. The Performance Shop could have just been a glorified menu, but turning it into a little car sandbox is a fun touch. The developers compared it to The Sims.
Sooner or later you’ll want to start really racing, though. The team considered making a Gear.Club Unlimited an open-world game, and a future entry might use that model. But this game instead has 400 individual races (rally, derby, single lap, etc.) set across different fictional locations inspired by locales like the Mediterranean or American deserts. Compared to some past racing sims, the team wanted more natural colors in the environments.
To see all of those races, you’ll have to progress through several tiers of tournaments and championships, and for that you’ll need better cars. Each car belongs to a certain category, A being the lowest and D being the highest. With the right upgrades, an A car could actually out-perform a low-end B car. But eventually you’ll still need to trade up to something totally better to keep moving forward. Besides, you’ll want to drive all the cars the game has to offer.
Along with 4-player splitscreen multiplayer (currently the only local multiplayer mode), Gear.Club Unlimited will roll out several online multiplayer modes after launch. The first one, available day one, is arcade. This mode is asynchronous, matching players against each other’s ghosts. However, because the data is stored in Eden Games’ own servers, you won’t need to pay for Nintendo’s still mysterious Switch online service to play.
There’ll be a lot in Gear.Club Unlimited when it launches December 1 on Nintendo Switch, but from there the developers want to keep building on it, treat it like a real platform.
