I was big into Clutch’s mix of story and racing styles, but the driving’s a lot simmier than I expected

Only the key creatives behind Forza Horizon currently have the sway to start up a brand new studio and secure the tens of millions of dollars in funding necessary to make a movie with a racing game attached to it. That’s Clutch, a “cinematic open world action-driving game where the worlds of professional and underground street racing collide across the French Riviera.”

It’s appropriate that Clutch is partially set in Monaco, because the whole game looks like money.

Big money is not something I tend to associate with racing games in 2026, outside a very small number of legacy names. Forza Horizon’s 6+ million sales in a matter of days makes it the only racing series going right now that pulls in the same kinds of numbers as, say, Sony’s prestigious third-person action games. So why not make one of those, which tons of people like, but about cars?

The pitch is sensible: So much of the appeal of heist movies or globetrotting capers like the Bond films is seeing suave people driving incredibly expensive cars around beautiful environs. Sim-focused racing games reproduce those cars in painstaking detail, while lighter racers that evoke the old arcade days often let you speed through those fun environments. Yet it’s rare for either style of racing game to ever really make you care much about the person behind the wheel, even in the rare instances they have a story mode.

Clutch is betting those millions of dollars that fully mocapped actors, a wealth of cutscenes, and an open world will make the difference. An hour-long presentation at this past weekend’s Summer Game Fest highlighted just how much attention the developers are paying to their licensed cars, their recreations of real European cities, the nuanced facial expressions of brother and sister Theo and Cass Martial, promising young stars of the R1K racing league who get pulled into the sketchier world of street racing.

The setup seems to promise quite a routine story, starting with a deadly crash during an R1K race and an on-the-nose threat from the league’s chairman to take away the agency of human drivers by using more automated braking systems and such to prevent crashes. Theo, shaken by his front row seat to a friend dying on the track, agrees. Cass and their adoptive father seem to side with the idea that the freedom to live on the edge for the sake of sport is more important, though hopefully the story plays out with a bit more subtlety than that.

Ten minutes later Theo was stealing a car outfitted with our first example of “Clutch Tech,” a harpoon he used to drive right off the deck of a penthouse, grapple to a nearby helicopter, and safely swing the vehicle into the hills outside Monaco—so I’m not sure subtlety will ultimately be a high priority for Clutch.

The reason I ultimately really like Clutch’s narrative pitch isn’t that I hope to be moved to tears by Theo’s story, anyway. I like it because it serves as a way to stitch together and give meaning to different types of racing. You can get chased by the police and have to outrun them, breaking line of sight long enough to hide in a parking lot. But these aren’t just missions you select from a menu: when Theo went to steal that car, he had to avoid the security detail patrolling a garage, with a dedicated button for ducking out of sight in his BMW convertible. You’ll have to do that whenever you venture into an off-limits zone, and if you get caught, a chase ensues.

Street racing with the Midnight Collective lets you earn money to buy new cars, and here Clutch is particularly Forza Horizony, with in-fiction livestreams of the street races letting you build up your popularity (and cash) by taking viewer requests mid-race, like performing drifts or near-misses with oncoming traffic. Winning the race matters, but you could still be outscored by an opponent who puts on a flashier show, adding a nice bit of variety to your goals. Here Clutch Tech like that harpoon gives racing a bit of arcadey flair, too, letting you take impossibly sharp corners that you’ll find in the winding streets of the French Riviera.

When Theo and Cass finally make it back onto the track at the R1K, the racing will lean more serious. This was the only bit of Clutch I actually got to play, with just a few minutes of hands-on time at the end of the demo. I immediately drove too fast into a turn and was penalized for careening off the track.

At that point I realized that how I imagined Clutch would control and how it actually feels in the hand are very different things. I spent much of the demo excited that someone was making a game in the vein of classic Need For Speed or Rockstar’s Midnight Club, but with way more going on around the edges of those straightforward races. My quick impression, though, is that it feels far more like Forza Horizon—heavier than an arcade racer, with that now-familiar racing line encouraging you to brake as you go around corners. There’s no Burnout-style smashing into other cars to knock them out. You may have an E-brake, but you’re not going to be drifting around every corner like an Initial D prodigy.

I shouldn’t be too surprised that Clutch plays like a game made by people who really care about simulating real cars. And to be clear, it’s more approachable than something like Gran Turismo—by lap two I was already doing much better, tapping the brakes as I went around corners and not outright embarrassing myself behind the wheel. But this sort of ‘halfway sim’ feel just isn’t really my style of driving. I crave nitrous and ridiculous drifts; I want Burnout Paradise, but with Clutch’s narrative framing populating the open world with rival racers and missions with snippets of story; I want to remember a narrow one-way as the perfect place to ditch the cops or recognize a tunnel as the one I drove that car Theo stole into the back of a box truck, pulling off a perfect Fast & Furious vanishing act.

I’m mourning, a little bit, that Clutch probably isn’t precisely the racing game for me. Even in the street races with Clutch Tech bending the laws of physics, I fear it will feel a bit too heavy, the kind of racer that encourages you to brake for every turn instead of grinding your car along the metal guardrail at max speed. But I’m also seemingly the rare outlier who does not outright love Forza Horizon.

And if, like PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage, you love most everything about Forza Horizon 6 except “how bland the dialogue is… all trite platitudes and empty positivity,” Clutch is almost certainly going to be the game for you.

I have a feeling that’s exactly why it exists—because a few years ago Horizon studio Playground Games was divided over the idea that people would care about anything happening when they’re not in control of the car. Forza is bland by design. The new studio, Maverick Games, is pouring millions of dollars into the hope that you won’t reach for your phone every time a character starts talking. I hope they’re right, because I want a game that looks like Clutch with the energy of Crank: High Voltage—the second you slow down, you’re already dead.