Clutch

I've got a soft spot for the kind of game that arrives with no marketing budget and a bonkers premise, and Clutch from Targem Games is exactly that. You're a survivor in a city wrecked by a Large Hadron Collider accident, the streets are packed with shambling mutants, and your primary tool for dealing with all of it is a heavily armoured car moving at speed. Forget simulation, forget leaderboard chasing. This is arcade combat racing with a post-apocalyptic paint job, built by the same Russian studio that gave us Hard Truck Apocalypse. The core loop is simpler than it first appears. You roam a single open map split into distinct zones - city streets, a harbour, a highway stretch, and the collider complex itself - and pick up missions from hotspots scattered around. Those missions cover eight different event types: standard lap races, artifact collection runs, zombie-kill challenges, a knockout mode where the last-place car gets blasted by a chasing artifact every ten seconds, and a rescue mode where you protect stationary vehicles from zombie swarms. The variety sounds decent on paper, and for the first couple of hours it genuinely is. The problem is that the driving model is thin. All vehicle combat is melee-only, no ranged weapons, no special attacks, just ramming. Boost is filled by running over zombies, which is satisfying exactly as many times as you'd expect before the novelty wears down. Critics landed around 51 on Metacritic, and that number is honest. Steam players are kinder, sitting at 80 percent positive, and those are largely the people who knew what they were buying. There is no multiplayer. None at all, local or online. For a game that practically begs to be played with a friend shotgunning energy drinks and screaming at your wheel, this is the single biggest omission in the package. The GameSpot review from launch called this out bluntly, and nothing has changed since. If you were hoping to run a four-player zombie-splatter session, keep walking. The campaign is also short, roughly five hours to see the credits, and the story is delivered entirely through journal entries that suffer from translation issues that range from charming to genuinely confusing. What Clutch does have going for it is atmosphere and price. The map has a specific grimy texture to it, the kind of budget Eastern European game art that accidentally ends up feeling more oppressive than anything a bigger studio would deliver. The artifact system, where pickups can flip race dynamics mid-event, adds a small layer of chaos that keeps individual races from feeling totally rote. Controller support is solid for a 2009 title. Do not bother with a wheel here, there is no force feedback worth mentioning and the arcade physics would feel wrong on a sim setup anyway. A gamepad is the right call. This is a game for a specific and shrinking audience: people who remember Carmageddon fondly, who can forgive dated visuals and a rough translation, and who want something to chip away at alone for a few evenings. It is not a game for anyone expecting multiplayer, meaningful depth, or production values beyond budget tier. At the price it typically sells for now, the ask is low enough that the flaws are easier to absorb. Just go in knowing the fun has a hard ceiling.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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