The Club

We’re a bit late with our review of The Club. Don’t blame us, blame late review code and a Polish lorry driver wiping me out of action for a few days last week (and my car for a lot longer). Still the delay has enabled us to hear countless new-age journalists waffle on about The Club being less of a third-person shooter and more like a racing game. ‘Three parts shooter to one part racer’…’it’s just like a racing game…having to learn every corner and every divot before you can set the fastest time’. Shut up! You’re embarrassing yourselves. In an attempt to be different, you’re just following everyone else like Sheep in an attempt to be radical. And The Club doesn’t follow like a Sheep, it innovates and deserves more than the perfunctory reviews that have been doing the rounds, some of which appear to have played it for less than an hour before rushing out with their review full of new-age journalistic comments. Go back to stroking your beards, and let those that are more interested in gameplay than making bizarre (fnar!) comments enjoy the uniqueness of The Club!

The Club is unlike any other third-person shooter I’ve played, but it’s still a third-person shooter. Yes it may borrow aspects of other genres, but I would say that it has more in common with older Arcade style shooters than a racing game. It feels a lot like an old Sega arcade game that they never released, which is fairly high praise considering how good they used to be.

To succeed in The Club, you can’t just kill someone and hide around the corner to regain some health or choose a different gun, you have to keep shooting enemies and Skull signs in order to keep your combo meter ticking over (or extend your time, depending on what mode you are playing). And just shooting them won’t provide you with the highest scores either; in order to achieve those you have to shoot them immediately after a role, after a quick-turn or by rebounding a bullet off of a piece of scenery. In order to compete on anything other than the lowest skill-level, you have to invest quite a lot of time on each level so that you know where the enemies will appear, where all the Skull signs are and what the best route through the level is.

What The Club does exceptionally well though is run and gun gameplay. I arguably had more fun playing this than a lot of the AAA titles of recent months and while I admit that it doesn’t have the depth of other shooters, and doesn’t have enough ‘wow’ moments, I still couldn’t stop having one more go in an attempt to set a slightly higher score. As a single-player game The Club packs a hefty challenge, with obscenely high scores required to compete against the AI in the Tournament mode on even the default difficulty level. It does, however, irritatingly suffer from ‘Mario Kart AI’ where one character always finishes first in each of the tournament’s levels, which makes it a tad frustrating.

Online it’s equally as good and challenging, with a decent set of online friends, but sadly suffers from a lack of foresight from Bizarre. Our forays online weren’t packed with people playing The Club, which took us by surprise at first considering how good the online modes are, but the answer soon presented itself. The person who hosts the game has the option of quitting it at any stage and unfortunately the host isn’t then moved. The game is then over with no penalty to the person who decided to quit and no reward for the person who was leading at the time. On one game I had 47 kills and was only three kills away from winning the match, with the second placed person way back on 21 kills, when the host decided to quit the game resulting in seven other players having wasted just over fifteen minutes playing a game that came to no conclusion! A simple host-migration option would have resolved this issue and would have made playing The Club online less of a lottery.

Obviously with a good set of online buddies this type of situation doesn’t happen though, and with The Club supporting up to 16 players at once, it’s one of the better and instantly rewarding online shooters I’ve played. Offline there is a 4-player split-screen mode that is equally as fun and reminded me of TimeSplitters in a way. You can also create your own tournaments in ‘Gunplay’ mode, which results in The Club being the best form of post-pub videogame entertainment that I have encountered in a while.

Despite appearing to be nothing more than a shallow experience at first, The Club soon elevates into a hardcore game that gamers who thrive on besting high-scores will love. It can be picked up and enjoyed in short bursts but still rewards those that want to put in the hours and perfect their runs. It should therefore appeal to anybody, whether they want something immediate or something they can sink hours into. Obviously you have to go in prepared to play it in an entirely different way to how you would normally play a third-person shooter, but as long as you go in with your eyes open and willing to experience something that freshens up the genre unlike anything else in recent memory, The Club is well worth the cost of membership.

Our rating

8/10