Clutch Is the Anti-Forza, a Heist Movie Set in Monaco

The Forza Horizon formula got sanitized into a money-printing live service. A studio of ex-Forza devs is betting you’d rather steal a car from a penthouse and run from the cops.

The Forza Horizon series is a money printer, a polished and predictable festival that has dominated open-world racing for a decade. Few have dared to compete. Now, a new studio called Maverick Games, staffed by some of the architects of Horizon itself, is building a direct competitor. Their game, Clutch, is set in Monaco, but this isn't the sterile Formula 1 circuit we've driven a thousand times. It’s an open-world rendition of the entire French Riviera, from the hairpin turns to the back alleys. The real story isn't just the map, though. It's the on-foot missions, the narrative focus, and the fact that you can steal a car from a penthouse apartment. This isn't another racing festival; it's a heist.

The early footage screams Unreal Engine 5, and that choice is the key to Maverick's entire pitch. An off-the-shelf engine like UE5 provides the tools to build both high-fidelity car models and the convincingly human characters we see in the cutscenes. Systems like Nanite allow for the staggering geometric detail of Monaco's architecture without melting a GPU, while Lumen handles the realistic light bouncing through narrow streets at night. This unified technical foundation makes the blend of driving and on-foot gameplay possible without the kludgy transitions of older games. The real challenge isn’t rendering the world, but making it feel alive. Engineering physics for a classic BMW 507 a player might cruise in has to coexist with the arcade handling needed for a high-speed police chase, all while civilian AI navigates streets far tighter than Horizon's open plains. That’s a profoundly harder problem to solve.

Maverick Games is picking a fight with the giant it helped create: Playground Games and its parent, Microsoft. Forza Horizon is a comfortable, reliable revenue stream, a low-stakes live service that has cornered the market. Maverick is making a nine-figure bet that players are bored with the formula and crave the narrative grit of older Need for Speed titles. Their marketing is lean, seeding footage directly to YouTubers to sidestep the traditional PR machine and build authentic hype. If Clutch succeeds, it proves a multi-billion dollar market still exists for story-driven racers, forcing Microsoft and EA to react. If it fails, it reinforces the market's preference for sanitized sandboxes and makes it that much harder for the next indie studio to get funding for a similarly ambitious project.

With a release target a year away, Clutch has a long road ahead. The gap between a polished vertical slice and a 60-hour, bug-free open world has killed plenty of ambitious titles. Maverick's primary risk is execution; blending two distinct game loops—third-person action and arcade racing—into one seamless experience is a notorious technical and design challenge. If they pull it off, the next five years of the racing genre could see a shift away from sprawling, empty countrysides and toward dense, photorealistic cityscapes that serve as characters themselves. The industry spent ten years turning racers into family-friendly theme parks. The only real question is whether players are ready to have fun breaking the law again.