Gearshifters (Switch)
Some game design ideas are too good to confine to one genre. For example, it’s fairly common to find role-playing game elements like leveling up and unlocking new skills even in fast-paced first-person shooters because they’re so effective in adding some engaging player-led progress. Gearshifters is a clear cut car combat game when it comes to its genre, but to add some extra flair, it chooses to borrow from rogue-likes when it comes to how its campaign is structured. However, not every game mechanic works so well when divorced from other important parts of its genre.
Gearshifters’s approach to its campaign is perhaps best described with the name it gives the achievement you earn for clearing the game: Rogue-ish. In this driving game, you are tasked with delivering materials in a post-apocalyptic version of Europe, your car needing to drive through hostile gang territory to do so. What actually ends up being more important than those deliveries though are taking down the gangleaders in their highly advanced battle vehicles, these providing the data shards needed to enter the supposedly utopic Citadel. This does feel more like context than a plot worthy of paying much attention to, although it does at least pique a tiny bit of curiosity when it answers some questions you might not have even considered asking about the situation.
Depending on the mode you pick, the way you tackle this quest to enter the Citadel will vary. Arcade, Standard, and Extended are all variations on a pretty straightforward approach often made just a bit easier or harder by some degree, but Deadly tries to give the game a bit of the rogue-like flair by integrating permadeath. Funnily enough, despite this being an option, Gearshifters doesn’t feel like it’s built for this option very well. This is primarily because this car combat game feels like it’s built more around frequently dying, heading back to base, and purchasing upgrades to do better the next time you head out. You don’t need to start from the very beginning should your car get wrecked though, and outside of Extended mode, you only need to beat each boss once. Normally, each gang territory needs to be beat once to grab the data shard, then if you die in a later level, you will be thrown back to the older stages but they’re much easier since there’s no longer a boss fight. Clear the level two more times, and it’s clear for good. Unfortunately, replaying levels often feels like a bit of a repetitive waste of time, it good for earning money but to what degree the randomization alters the road’s shape and which enemies appear feels minimal.
While on the road, your car initially is a fairly weak tool in battle. Your vehicle will always be driving right automatically, cars appearing from behind you and in front of you to try and take you out. You only have front-facing weapons like machine guns, but eventually you can purchase secondary weapons that can potentially hit in the area around you or you can buy powers like leaving an oil slick behind you. Powers need you to build up energy first to use them though and secondary weapons have limited ammo, so only whatever front-firing gun you choose to use will be reliable. This can make the early game a bit rough, the player having to try and slide in behind cars that often have back-firing attacks that can deal heavy damage despite that being the only angle you’ll be able to hit the vehicles from. You can ram cars for damage, this eventually becoming a pretty good option once you’ve heavily invested in related upgrades, but what you’re really waiting for are the points in the story where you unlock abilities like being able to drive backwards and fire on foes that were behind you or do a slide to attack diagonally.
Over time, as you play levels, die because you were outgunned and outmaneuvered, and face bosses that will probably kill you with tricks you need to learn on the fly, you’ll accrue money to purchase upgrades. However, you must also find schematics from defeating enemy drivers, meaning you’re not guaranteed to be unlocking truly useful gear. In fact, while I mentioned the oil slick, it’s hard to invest in certain weapons or powers because they are often inferior to more reliable options. A power that can make the fairly rare repair items drop for a bit or one that increases your defense are far more useful than laying down some spikes or briefly turning invisible, meaning schematics can be slow to provide the real game changing gear that will help you break through the gang territories with tougher foes or a pesky boss. Any upgrade you buy is persistent and can be swapped around as you wish at least, but in one of the weakest cases of the game embracing rogue-like design, the roads are divided into a few sections and each one starts of by letting you pick a temporary upgrade. It will only last for that stretch of road, it sometimes has a cost like some of your money or ammunition despite being such a brief boost, and often picking something permanent like some free money or a schematic is wiser than getting a small boost to firing speed or the truly silly option to detect civilian cars when they’re approaching when there are so few and destroying them doesn’t even impose that harsh of a cash penalty.
Gearshifters feels like most of its barriers to progress will be as you work up to have better defense upgrades and stronger weapons, but there are at least some differences between gang territories beyond just packing more punch. You’ll leave cities and paved roads to eventually drive on ice and sand. The game breaks away from mostly just throwing cars with guns on their back at you to new designs like helicopters, trucks that dump flaming barrels, and vehicles with more advanced weaponry like homing rockets or sniper turrets that are a bit harder to avoid than ones where you just need to not be right behind the car. They aren’t diversified enough to be that exciting, in fact, sometimes they make things duller like the ice roads having a high chance of stretches where ramming cars are easily dodged or road barriers you can weave around easily enough are the main concern. They do at least ask you to be a competent driver and make use of your abilities, and the bosses all at least look pretty impressive. Giant machines with huge saws or a wrecking ball are joined by brand new vehicle types like a train, these confrontations often a check of your defense because they can fill the battlefield with firepower but at least they do inspire a bit of awe compared to the standard foes you fight on your way to them. You almost miss them when you do those repeat runs on the same stretch of road, and while Extended adds them back in, you’ll likely learn to loathe them if they were always present since it would slow down the unnecessary retreads even more.
THE VERDICT: Gearshifters isn’t really a rogue-like, but most of the ideas it tries to borrow from that genre make it worse. The car combat is already fairly weak thanks to a poor range in enemy vehicles and your own limited power, something the light randomization of a level can’t do much about. The progress through the story is hindered by how important permanent upgrades feel to success while temporary upgrades feel like such a minor part of the experience they might as well not exist. The bosses can add bursts of excitement and once you have some important abilities like being able to fire your guns at an angle the regular roads become a bit more bearable, but Gearshifters often feels like you’re just working towards removing impediments to your progress rather than buying exciting gear or facing new unique situations.
And so, I give Gearshifters for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. Perhaps Arcade mode and some tinkering with the Damage Scale and Boss Toughness options could make Gearshifters closer to what it likely should have been: a standard car combat adventure. Replaying previous levels could exist as an option if you want to maybe buy better equipment, but here, losing to a boss and doing hollow replays of early levels until they’re removed from the map feels like it just drags things out. It takes quite a while for your vehicle to feel like it’s even fighting fit since the abilities are withheld and many schematics provide attack options that are situational rather than proper improvements. When you are closer to being prepared for battle, there can be moments where new car types or the boss machines provide some more of what you’d hope to see throughout the adventure, but they lose their sheen once you understand them enough not to really struggle with them next time you see them. The upgrades can start trivializing them too, although at least even some of the higher end guns may still require you to be quick to land your shots or employ some ramming as well if you want to take out enemies before they get their shots in or escape without leaving a helpful resource behind on death.
Perhaps leaning more into rogue-like ideas could have worked as well, if difficulty was adjusted to suit the threat of permadeath and your success wasn’t as dependent on getting to the good schematics so you can actually hold your own against the later cars. Gearshifters needs a rebalancing regardless of whatever direction it would choose to embrace though, the current state of the game focused on forward progress rather than meaningfully remixing its content into new and exciting scenarios. Since it only wants to be rogue-ish, repeats feel tedious rather than unique and you don’t have any interesting builds or combos to try besides a fairly obvious ramp up in power. Gearshifters does mostly wear itself down rather than always being rough though, this vehicular action game needing to shift the action into something deeper or more diverse if it wants players to actually ride its roads again and again.