Close but No Cigar!
It’s not hard to initially be impressed with Cyber Clutch: Hot Import Nights. After loading the game, excellent cyberpunk-style visuals, along with an awesome thumping soundtrack, assault your visual and audio senses. It’s only after the first couple of races that you realize that all is not as it should be.
Cyber Clutch is an arcade-style racer with guns! It’s a great idea on paper, just not very well implemented. The basic premise of the game is that you race on a set of tracks against seven other opponents, but your ride has guns and various abilities.
You pick up armour and mysterious objects along the way. The tracks have power boosts, jumps, and health pick-ups. You blast around a track for three laps, trying to take down or hinder your opponents in the hope of winning. The only other mechanic the game throws at you is that if you power slide around a corner and then let go, you get a speed boost.
Simple, straightforward stuff. You can race single-player in a series of cups or take it online and try to get on to the world leaderboard (as I type, I’m currently 5th in the world – Berserker-Boy). There is also an option for private lobbies.
So, what is the problem? It’s not the look or the soundtrack of the game, for sure. It looks great, and the tracks themselves are visually very interesting. They have certainly nailed the neon-lit cityscapes. The lighting, detail, and sense of speed are also impressive. The scenery around you convincingly blurs as you go faster. It’s because the game looked good and sounded great (well, the soundtrack, anyway) that I was really hoping this would be fun to play.
But it’s not. Let’s start with, at one point, the game made my PS5 crash so hard that I thought it was broken! The game just froze, as did my PS5. Not even the on/off switch worked.
When I rebooted, repaired, and rebuilt my hard drive, I tried again. A big issue, really, is that the races themselves against AI are a bit dull. They are dull for a couple of reasons. The weapons (apart from one) don’t really do anything, and the tracks (again, apart from one) are pretty dull. I could, on a couple of tracks, literally hold the accelerator on full the whole time and still not win.
A majority of the races, both online and offline, went like this:
We all start. The weapons aren’t activated immediately. After about 20 seconds, they are active. There is a massive shootout where everyone goes crazy. If you escape the initial carnage, you’ll generally finish in the top 3. If you don’t and get caught up in it, forget winning.
The key points the game has are an utter letdown. Each car has specific weapons, but only one car with a laser death ray is worth using to take out other cars. The car with the death ray not only hits with alarming accuracy that its target can’t do anything about, but it also almost instantly one-shot kills you if you haven’t got full health. All the weapons of the other cars just chip away at health, and that’s if you are lucky enough to get a hit!
The other key mechanic is the drifting. The drift mechanic is supposed to help you, but you just slow down to drift and don’t get much in the way of a boost to make it worth your while. The game also says that if you are behind, you get extra speed over the boosts to catch up. If you are at the back of the field, this does happen, but in midfield, you stay there. Even worse is the car handling. Drift and get it wrong, you hit a barrier and then bounce off it like you are in a pinball game. If there is a barrier on the other side of the road, you ping right back again!
Although you can feel a difference in the handling of the different cars, they all felt pretty horrible. You don’t get a sense of weight, or if you crash, a feeling of destruction or movement! One car oversteers horribly. Another car just feels like it’s constantly on ice. The qualities these cars have to counter these traits don’t make up for them.
That all said, there IS fun to be found here if you dig enough. I finally found a car that suited me, and I enjoyed driving it. It wasn’t the best, but it worked for me. I found a track that I really liked (Pipes) as it had a bit more nuance to it than just holding the throttle down the entire way. So, I thought I’d take my newfound interest in the game online.
I spent ages looking for other people to race online, and in climbing to 5th in the world on their leaderboard, I have only actually managed to be in an online race with another actual human being once, for one race!
And WHAT a race it was. See below:
I’m not going to lie, I jumped out of my seat and fist pumped the air with this one.
It’s just a shame that this has been a singular experience as I can’t find any other people to race against. The AI bots are horrible to race with. They all seem to be on rails and bash my car to send it flying, but I can’t do the same to them.
I’m really rooting for the game. It’s got massive potential, even now. Add a new way to find online lobbies to race with people. Tweak the car handling. Make all the weapons a little more effective. Nerf the laser weapon. Make drivers have to use their brakes in sharp corners. With those changes alongside the excellent visuals, you would have a “banger” on your hands. Until changes like that happen, all you actually have at the moment is a frustrating and slightly boring but good-looking mess.
Summary
Close but no cigar. Self-inflicted design choices hinder what could have been a solid, fun racer. Cyber Clutch: Hot Import Nights most certainly looks great, sounds great, but just doesn’t play great. Too much frustration and boredom cast a shadow over the good the game has.
Developer: Gunpowder Games/Focus Point Studios
Publisher: Current Games
Platform: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X
Release Date: 24th July 2025
Gaming Respawn’s copy of Cyber Clutch: Hot Import Nights was provided by the publisher.
