My first question is why the heck does this have the Hot Import Nights branding? Hot Import Nights is about tuner culture and hot girls standing next to hot cars. This game doesn't have any girls, or people at all, and all of the cars are fictional. You can customize them with a lot of really gaudy ugly "cyberpunk" parts, but they generally look absolutely terrible and it doesn't affect performance at all, so there's no point to the customization. Which means there's especially no point to having the Hot Import Nights branding in the first place.
I also have to call out the marketing for the game. They actually use the term "neon soaked" to describe the cyberpunk world the game takes place in. I hate that so much. That's totally cringe. That's totally amateur. Even if it is a bright neon wonderland of color, have some pride as a writer and creative person and come up with literally any other term to use. That copy would have never passed my desk back in my editor days.
Anyway, the game itself sucks too. It's an arcade racer sort of thing with Mario Kart-style weapons and drifting around corners to build up boost, but they got it all wrong somehow. The handling is terrible. The drifting is terrible. The physics are really, really terrible. You bounce wildly off the sides of the track, fly off jumps at weird angles and die, and there are right angle edges all over every track you get stuck on that bring you to a dead stop while the other cars blow past you.
The A.I. cars are insane as well and will just absolutely hammer you with seemingly infinite shots and instantly kill you over and over and over and over again in every race. There's no invincibility period or anything to give you a moment to escape, either, you just get hit over and over. The game has a lock on system for the weapons that seems to work 100% of the time for the A.I. but only about 15% of the time for you.
Some of the tracks are just abysmally horrible as well. And then they're even worse when you have to run them in reverse. The crazy thing is that even though you're constantly flying off the track and dying and getting shot from behind and dying, there is insanely heavy rubber banding going on that always keeps you in the race. I guess it's because the A.I. is also struggling with the crappy track designs and broken physics so they're blowing up constantly too, but you can easily go from last to first in the blink of an eye. But it isn't fun to play in general and definitely isn't satisfying when you win. It's too crazy and unpredictable to be satisfying because it never feels like you have any actual input on the outcome.
There's also not that much content here, really. There are only a small handful of tracks and five single player cups of three races each to play through. And that's it. There is online play, but no one is playing this stinker. For $20 - or $15 on Steam - I suppose the amount of content is probably OK, but the quality of said content drags the value proposition down a lot.
It does look kind of cool, at least. Some of the tracks look great - the ones at night - and some of the tracks look horrible - the ones during the day. At night there are great reflections and the neon is glowing all over and it's really flashy and cool looking. There is a decent-ish sense of speed as well. One big flaw in the presentation is that the sound is fairly terrible. The engine sounds are very muted, or maybe just nonexistent, and the music seems to fade in and out at random. All you can really hear is the sound of constantly getting hammered from behind by the other cars' machine guns any time they're within 500 yards of you.
I can't express just how big of a disappointment this game is. I so badly wanted a fun new arcade racer but Cyber Clutch just sucks in pretty much every way. It plays bad, there is no difficulty balance at all, the tracks are bad, the sound is bad, the car customization is utterly pointless and hideously ugly. It does absolutely nothing right. Don't buy Cyber Clutch. You'll regret it.
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