Part of the Hot Import Nights franchise, Cyber Clutch tries to emulate kart racers but with a cyberpunk twist.
I wasn’t familiar with Hot Import Nights as a franchise beyond the subtitle for the fairly well liked Juiced 2 from nearly 20 years ago. It turns out they’re a group that tours (mostly) America with cool cars doing music and driving festivals. Turns out I learned a thing today. Anyway, the name is attached to Cyber Clutch, a high speed racer with cool looking cars and a lot of visual customisation, but is a little bit weak under the hood.
Whilst Cyber Clutch may describe itself as an arcade racer, it really has a lot more in common with kart racers but with the pace of an anti gravity racer like Redout. You’ll hurtle around bright, neon-soaked tracks, racing flashy cars against the standard seven opponents. Each car comes equipped with a basic attack, a special attack, and can collect power ups to add to their offensive capabilities. The goal is, perhaps unsurprisingly, to cross the finish line first.
Before getting into the gameplay, it’s worth talking about how Cyber Clutch looks. It’s an absolute assault on the eyes, in both a positive and negative way. The tracks and cars look really impressive, with tons of neon colours popping out everywhere. If you look at a screenshot or when you’re in a calmer moment in the race and everything is smoothly rocketing past, this looks glorious. Car designs are fabulous, and the tracks feel like bonkers cityscapes in a technology-gone-mad future and I really like how the art style comes together as something really fitting for the type of game the devs are going for.
With that said, when things kick off during a race and there are cars and attacks popping off everywhere, it’s an absolute nightmare to see what’s going on. Cars bounce around, attacks blitz past you, and giant space lasers fill 30% of the screen, all whilst you’re trying to follow a track, shoot at opponents, and maybe use that Kart racer staple drift mechanic to get ahead of the pack. This isn’t constant during a race, but it happens too often for me to be entirely happy with having to put up with it. Tone down the volume of attacks and reduce the flashy effects!
Anyway, in single player mode you can do a quick race or a three race series to win a trophy and access a handful of unlocks in the form of cars and cosmetics. Three laps, eight racers, and a lot of fast racing. The car you pick does have a few unique features, with each falling into one of three categories and having its own special attack. Light cars have a lower max speed and health pool but accelerate much quicker, whilst Heavy cars reverse this. Shockingly, Medium falls in between. The individual stats for each car don’t really feel like they make much difference, so it’s more a case of which car group do you prefer. Personally I had the most success with Medium, but maybe I’m just boring.
In terms of attacks, everyone gets a straight forward shot that recharges fairly quickly. Special attacks are a bit more varied, with some being a homing shot and others leaving a damaging attack behind it. All of these reduce vehicle health, and when one is destroyed it gets reset a little further back on the course and carries on. No player elimination here which is nice. How far you get set back feels wildly varied though, and it feels like there are invisible checkpoints that act as respawn points. It’s frustrating to be most of the way through a tunnel only to be reset five seconds back when on a different death you’d lose just a single second.
Powerup attacks fit the usual bill, with boosters, missiles, and droppable mines being par for the course. I will say that it’s hard to tell what pick up you have due to the crowded and difficult to read HUD that appears under your car, but generally picking one up and hitting B on your controller will do something useful. There is one though, that is the bane of this game. The orbital laser can absolutely do one. This is the equivalent of the blue shell from Mario Kart that targets the first place player. Unlike that spikey boy that appears maybe once or twice in a race, this will hit the player in first place two-to-three times per lap. It’s incredibly annoying as it does huge damage, to the point that a Light vehicle will likely be destroyed, and also fills up most of the screen making it really hard to see where you’re going.
That feels like Cyber Clutch all over though. A really neat idea that hasn’t been fully thought through. Neat weapons that are too effective. Great visuals that are used excessively. Lots of cars that feel too similar. Fantastic cosmetics that mean nothing in a race when you can’t pay attention to them. There’s a great idea here that really needs more refinement as as it stands, Cyber Clutch is fun enough but that’s it. Additionally, there aren’t that many different tracks, and there really doesn’t seem to be much of an online community to the point where I couldn’t get a multiplayer game on Xbox to test it out. It’s a great setup for something impressive, but as it stands you might want to admire the bodywork but leave it on the forecourt.
Cyber Clutch is available now on PC, Xbox, and Playstation.
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