by Maverick Games, crewed by developers from Playground Games and founded by Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, has revealed its first game. It's called Clutch and it's a beautiful take on the arcade racing and underworld intrigue of the Need for Speed series, complete with nitrous-and-neon car customisation and an open world set in the French Riviera. The game was revealed yesterday with a brief trailer, launched alongside a series of first impressions videos from content creators.
While Need for Speed as a series has embraced open world racing for 22 years, Clutch seems to have more of the spread of activities of a Forza Horizon game, with both an above-board "R1K" racing series like NFS: ProStreet and a "Midnight Collective" that reminds of the "Blacklist" of NFS: Most Wanted. Skins co-creator Jamie Brittain has been tapped to write the storyline, which follows the fortunes of young sibling racers trying to make a name for themselves - and quickly getting caught up in a criminal conspiracy. It certainly sounds like a more interesting backdrop to the racing action than the bland kid's TV aesthetic of Forza Horizon.
What stuck me most about the game is its customisation system, which looks far deeper than both Forza Horizon 6 and NFS: Unbound. It starts with the usual collection of performance and visual upgrades, but extends into things like choosing seats and steering wheels, popping an old coffee cup or energy drink can into your cupholder, and even leaving loose items of clothing on the passenger seat and other assorted detritus on the dash.
Cars also look realistically grubby, with more obvious wear and tear than is typically presented in a game with licensed real-world automobiles. So far, the trailer shows off models from Porsche (Cayman GT4), BMW (M3), Land Rover (Defender), Fiat (Multipla), Alfa Romeo (4C), Ford (Focus), Lotus (Emira), Mazda (RX-7), Nissan (350Z), Renault (Megane), Subaru (Impreza) and Aston Martin (Vanquish), which is an encouraging early spread.
The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 (please hold your boos) and features some convincing detail on car exteriors and interiors, with realistic-looking light housings, seat fabrics and stereo buttons. It's not clear whether any UE5-exclusive features like Lumen and Nanite are being used, and of course performance is always a concern for this type of game - especially if you're using "ClutchTech mods" like the grappling hooks in the trailer to zip around the world in unexpected ways.
Clutch is currently scheduled to release in the first quarter of 2027 for PC, Xbox Series X/S and PS5, so it'll be interesting to see how the game takes shape over the next nine months or so and what other technical details are released. A trailer is promised as part of Summer Game Fest on June 5th, so we don't have too long to wait. For now, it's just cool to see an independent* studio take up the arcade racing mantle after the genre has become a bit predictable in recent years.