Clutch is coming for Forza’s crown with one of the best-looking games I’ve ever seen

In the nicest possible way, how does Clutch look so good?

That was my thought watching the first hour of the upcoming racer from Maverick. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Leamington Spa, UK-based team is filled to the brim with genre veterans. Boss Mike Brown previously served as the creative director on Forza Horizon, and Clutch isn’t much of a departure from that lineage.

The demo opens with a flashback to our main character as a child. After a dramatic cut forward, our hero is a competitive racing driver in the R1K, the world’s most prestigious racing series in Clutch. A high-speed crash and the loss of his best friends see Theo Martial (played by Tosin Cole) and his younger sister, Cass (played by UK hip-hop breakout star Little Simz), have their world turned upside down.

The boss of the R1K (played by Peter Serafinowicz) announces plans to introduce further AI integration to limit future accidents. The racers, appalled by this, decide to leave the championship behind and join the Midnight Collective, an underground street-racing group.

As you’re flying around the hills and valleys of France, a live, Twitch-like chat fills a small section of the screen. While I did laugh at one of the messages that scrolled by, it’s a bit visually busy. A racing game without a good soundtrack is nothing, and Maverick is well aware of that. The game starts with Let Me Entertain You by Robbie Williams (in case you forgot, Maverick is a British developer) and only gets better from there.

Soon, Theo finds himself involved in criminality and in debt to seriously dangerous people. Thankfully, his skill as a top racing driver means that he’s of great use to those trying to make some quick money.

First things first: this game is graphically ridiculous. I had long assumed I was way past the point of looking at pre-rendered cutscenes and wondering if it was live action, but a few of the scenes between Theo and Cass genuinely got me. I was astonished by just how good this game looked. Sure, the driving sections also look immense, but racing games have looked amazing for a very long time.

Clutch’s opening is a cinematic montage of R1K races, street races, and more. It’s here that I’m introduced to the game’s setting, the French Riviera. Monaco and the surrounding countryside make for a natural open world in which to set a racing game. When peeling through the hills, the glow of the world’s most expensive city can be seen from miles around. When you actually make it into the streets of Monaco, they’re just as winding and tight as the famous F1 race.

The mission we’re watching sees Theo work with a mysterious fixer (played by Jane Perry) who enlists him to steal a supercar. Once Theo finally tracks down what the fixer was after, there’s the small issue of the supercar being hundreds of feet above street level at the top of a penthouse.

“This game is graphically ridiculous. I’d long assumed I was way past the point of looking at pre-rendered cutscenes and wondering if it was live action, but a few scenes got me.”

No issue, however, as in the heightened world of Clutch, you obviously have a grappling hook that you can shoot into the side of a helicopter and swing your way out of danger. The grappling hook isn’t just for cinematic ridiculousness, however. It can also be used to hook into lamp posts and swing round corners at ridiculous angles, and other physics-mocking fun.

Clutch is striking a compelling balance between realistic, sim-adjacent racing and Fast and Furious slapstick. How many of the game’s missions will be garnished by these moments of “well, he’d be absolutely dead in real life” wackiness is unknown, but if they’re used sparingly, and with as much punch as this first one, we’re in for a treat.

After the hands-off portion of the demo, I got to play one race in the R1K. Handling-wise, it feels exactly like you’d imagine a game from the Forza Horizon devs to handle. It’s perhaps pitched slightly closer to sim racing than Forza, but we’re not getting towards Gran Turismo or iRacing territory.

I was so impressed by what I saw of Clutch. From the visuals to the racing itself, to the writing and all the accouterments around the edges, Clutch instantly became one of my most anticipated games.

If Maverick’s racer can maintain the momentum throughout its campaign that it showed off to me in its first hour, then there’s no reason Clutch can’t become the next major racing franchise.

Frankly, it’s astonishing that a major publisher isn’t behind it. Amazon‘s decision to leave the project looks baffling in hindsight, and if Sony and Microsoft didn’t have major racing franchises of their own, I’d urge them to pick it up.