// PC GAMER — GAMING
I was big into Clutch's mix of story and racing styles, but the driving's a lot simmier than I expected
I wish there was a little bit less Forza Horizons and a little bit more Burnout in this new narraracer.
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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.
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