Ex-Forza Horizon 5 Leads Reveal Clutch With a New Take on Speed

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Clutch was formally unveiled by Maverick Games at Summer Game Fest 2026 as the studio’s first original open-world action driving game. Led by former Forza Horizon 5 creative director Mike Brown, it is slated to launch in Spring 2027 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. The immediate hook is the structure: players race professionally by day and dive into illicit street pursuits by night.

That day-night split is the most interesting part of the pitch so far. In daylight, the game centers on the professional Riviera 1000 (R1K) circuit. At night, it shifts into the underground street-racing and gang-crime chases of the Midnight Collective. It gives the game a more layered rhythm than a standard checklist of events, assuming Maverick can pull it off. One side is about rules, prestige, and professional competition; the other is about risk, pursuit, and criminal escalation.

The setting is ambitious too. Clutch takes place on the French Riviera, with Maverick describing it as a version of the region that is larger than the real one. So this is less a strict one-to-one recreation and more an expanded open world shaped around driving. For a driving game, that is not a problem in itself. What matters is whether the road network feels coherent, whether urban routes connect naturally into mountain roads, and whether the coastal highways and tunnels are dense enough to give the map real driving value instead of reducing the place to scenery.

On the car side, the clearest details so far are that Clutch supports deep interior and exterior car customization, and that it is built on a custom version of Unreal Engine 5. The first matters because it will decide how much personal expression players really get from their cars. The second matters because it directly affects lighting, materials, terrain detail, and visual stability at high speed. For a game built around open-world driving and fast movement, UE5 sounds promising, but the real test is never the trailer. It is how the game streams the world at speed, how collisions feel, and whether the physics stay consistent. If the game leans too hard on customization or spectacle at the expense of those fundamentals, immersion can break just as quickly as control.

The cast also makes it clear Maverick wants this to be more than a loose string of races. The story follows siblings Theo and Cass Martial, voiced by Tosin Cole and Little Simz, with Jane Perry and Peter Serafinowicz also in the cast. Between the professional daytime competition, the nighttime underground faction, and the story's sibling leads, the narrative ambition is clear. The concern is equally clear: driving games often stumble when the cutscenes are strong but the actual driving feels hollow. If the mission design cannot connect cleanly to the handling and moment-to-moment driving, even a strong voice cast will amount to little more than set dressing.

If you already like the kind of open-road driving experience associated with Forza Horizon 5, this is an easy game to keep on your radar, especially with Mike Brown leading the project. At minimum, it suggests a core team that understands what makes an open-world driving game work. But if you are more demanding about vehicle physics, road design, and race logic, this is too early for a firm verdict. Better to wait for proper gameplay footage. If the underlying research and systems work are there, Clutch could become an important driving release in 2027. If it turns out to be all cinematic style and an oversized map with limited systemic depth, it will be much easier to admire than to trust.