Gearshifters

My first honest reaction when I loaded up Gearshifters was confusion about what genre I was even playing. I kept steering like it was a racer, treating lanes carefully, watching my cornering. Wrong instinct entirely. The moment I stopped driving and started shooting, everything clicked. This is a side-scrolling arcade shooter that happens to have wheels under it, not a car game that happens to have guns bolted on. Accept that early, and the whole experience opens up. The setup is blissfully simple: post-apocalyptic Europe, lawless factions running the roads, and you as a courier who shoots first and delivers second. The structure is 27 stages spread across 9 zones, each zone ending in a mega-machine boss battle that demands you juggle three different threats at once while your fingers are already doing too much. Between missions you hit the garage and spend your earned currency on a loadout that spans primary weapons, secondary weapons, armor, tires, engine upgrades, and passive buffs. There are over 100 parts to unlock. The catch is that the game caps how much you can upgrade per zone, so you never steamroll ahead. You are always just barely strong enough to survive the next stretch of road. That tension is Gearshifters at its best. The comparison that keeps coming up in the community is Spy Hunter, and it earns it. The car has actual weight and momentum. It brakes, it drifts, and you can pull off a powerslide to ram enemies with the chassis itself. Diagonal shooting by holding a half-drift is one of those small mechanical discoveries that feels genuinely clever. The enemy roster across zones includes trucks that drop flaming barrels, suicide drag racers, technicals firing sawblades, and bikes that shoot in multiple directions. Bosses are each creative set pieces. The problem is that once you clear a zone and beat its boss, you cannot return to fight it again, which will frustrate anyone who wanted to replay favorite encounters. Where the game loses some players is on the roguelite label. The randomness is relatively light. Enemy placement and road layouts shift a little between attempts, but you are not building wildly different runs like in Hades or Dead Cells. Some reviewers felt the weapon upgrade tree also gets repetitive in the back half, with late-game guns not feeling dramatically more powerful than earlier ones. The three difficulty modes help here: standard gives you checkpoints and retry chances, casual is genuinely forgiving, and the permadeath Deadly mode is for people who enjoy suffering voluntarily. Casual mode does enough to make this approachable for players who just want to blast through content without banging their head on a wall for hours. For solo PC players, controller is the way to go. The left stick for movement and face buttons for your primary, secondary, and special abilities feels natural in about five minutes. This is absolutely not a racing wheel game. It is a couch gamepad game through and through. Worth noting: it is a singleplayer-only title, so if your Saturday night crew is looking for split-screen chaos, this is not your answer. It is more of a "pass the controller after you die" kind of game, which still works fine in a group setting.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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