Everything We Learned From the CLUTCH Gameplay Livestream

In early June, Maverick Games finally revealed its first major game, Clutch, an open-world driving game from the mind of Mike Brown, founder of Maverick Games and former Creative Director for the Forza Horizon series. Today, Brown, along with Air Director Ben Penrose, hosted a deep dive livestream showing off nearly an hour’s worth of gameplay, giving an extended look at driving action, story details, and game features.

We watched the whole thing (and you can too, below), and we’re going to break down what we saw. We can’t cover everything, but we’ll go over some standouts from what we learned and our thoughts.

The Narrative is a BIG Part of Clutch

Clutch isn’t just an open-world driving game; it’s an open-world narrative driving game. Unlike a Forza Horizon game, which has a light story connecting events, Clutch‘s story drives (no pun intended) everything forward. Even in the opening hour, there are significant beats of drama as you meet the cast of characters. Starting with a flashback that reveals the origins of the two main characters, Theo and Cass, two orphaned siblings who are adopted by Ludo, a former racing legend who raises the siblings into formidable pro racers that compete in the prestigious R1K series.

The relationship between siblings and Ludo becomes strained after a tragedy, leading to a sequence of events that finds both of them participating in illegal street races as part of an underground group called the Midnight Collective. It appears that all the major events that happen in the game are tied to the narrative. There are even some unavoidable events that happen within a race that kick off the next beat of the story.

The style of storytelling seems to take what Need For Speed games have done in the past, but takes it further. From what we’ve seen so far, the story is already pulling us in enough that we want to know where it all goes, so that’s a good sign.

Clutch is Built on Unreal Engine 5

Unless you’re really tuned into the gaming industry, you probably have no idea what Unreal 5 is. So, why are we mentioning it as a standout? To sum it up, Unreal Engine is a gaming framework that allows artists to really push lighting and visual effects to create really high-quality photorealistic graphics. During the livestream, Penrose confirmed that the developers used SkyCapture technology in Clutch. In a nutshell, SkyCapture involves taking tons of high-resolution images of the sky for 24 hours using specialized HDR cameras and then using that information to create a realistic sky and drive the day/night cycles in the game.

The same technology has been used in Forza Horizon games for years; however, according to Penrose, Unreal Engine 5 was able to pull additional data from the SkyCapture images to push the lighting effects even further. “It means all of that great [lighting] data gets bounced around the scene and you get lovely bits of ambient light everywhere you’d want it,” said Penrose.

Many Ways To Interact With Cars

During the livestream, Brown and Penrose took questions live from Discord, and one of the first questions to come in asked about other ways players can interact with their cars outside of driving. In addition to the deep customization mode that we covered in the reveal, Brown mentioned that there will be a photo mode and even a video mode, complete with an editor, so that players can make clips in-game.

Brown also confirmed that players can turn headlights on and off as well as use turn signals. In fact, according to Brown, players can use those features to cause a bit of chaos, like highbeaming other drivers to cause them to swerve in the road slightly. Or if a car is chasing you, you can give it the ol’ switcheroo by signaling a left turn, but going right. It’s silly, but the kind of silly that we can see ourselves having a lot of fun with.

You Can Walk Around on Foot

During the stream, the devs visited Theo and Cass’ villa overlooking Monaco. Once there, you can get out of your car and walk around and fully explore the home. There’s artwork on the walls, a TV, and even a swimming pool in the back that you can walk right into. Since the team was playing an early build of the game, the water effects weren’t fully baked yet, so Theo stayed completely dry as he walked in and out of the water. However, Brown assured the audience that by the time Clutch is ready to release, players can walk or drive into the pool if they want to.

Players can also travel on foot at Midnight Collective meet-ups to explore the cars available to drive at street races. Furthermore, you can actually buy cars you like directly at Midnight Collective meet-ups. Older cars can be purchased at meet-ups, while brand-new cars can be bought at dealerships within the open world.

Street Races Are Won by Earning Fans

While R1K races are strictly traditional and decided by race position, street races are different. In Clutch, street races are livestreamed (in the game’s world) to fans, and sometimes the win condition of a street race depends on who has the most fan votes by the end. Those votes can be earned by driving fast, but they’re also earned by driving style, like executing drifts, for example.

In fact, players can actually see the live chat from the stream while racing, and viewers can put in “flare requests,” asking the player to perform a specific stunt. If the player obliges, they’ll get more viewers and bonus money.

You’re Gonna Do Crimes

The details were a bit hazy in the livestream, but at some point, the main character, Theo, steals a car from the head of the R1K, and to smooth the situation over, he reaches out to a shady fixer named Emory. She promises to help Theo in exchange for his help in stealing “Clutch Tech” (see what they did there?). Obviously, things do not go as planned, and not too soon after, the cops are chasing you through the streets of Monaco.

If that wasn’t interesting enough, Theo can use Clutch Tech to help him evade law enforcement. In the particular chase that was shown in the livestream, Theo had access to a harpoon that could help the car take tight turns by grabbing onto an anchor point at an apex, or it could be fired at other cars to send them out of control.

Clutch Isn’t Coming Out Anytime Soon

Toward the end of the livestream Brown pointed out that despite the team showing off gameplay, no one should expect Clutch to release soon. “We are a long, long way from release,” said Brown. “This is very early to be showing things.” That’s not all that shocking considering that when Clutch was revealed, there wasn’t so much as a release window given. To the credit of the developers, the game looks great already, even in this early stage, but it could be a year or more before Clutch is ready to get into player’s hands.

Other Important Notes

As we said, there was a lot revealed in this livestream, and this story would get way too long if we covered it all, so we’re going to wrap up with some quick-fire points of other notable reveals.

• Some modifications will be make/model specific and can’t be applied to other cars.
• Players can create three different “loadouts” of modifications that they can switch between events.
• The entire campaign (with the exception of the tutorial) can be played in online co-op multiplayer with one player controlling Theo and the other controlling Cass.

Watch The Stream For Yourself

If you want to check out the roughly hour-long stream and see if you can find anything we may have missed, check it out! Let us know your thoughts about Clutch after watching.

For now, Brown promised there will be more livestreams in the future that will dive deeper into other features of the game. We’ll keep our eye out for those and bring you more info as it becomes available.