The Club 7.2

UK, February 6, 2008 - Lazy statement : you can tell this was made by a developer best-known for racing games (Project Gotham, specifically). The values of repeatedly driving a car around a track as quickly as possible in the name of self-improvement are transposed into the equally familiar setting of bullets + men's faces. Smarter statement: actually, this has more in common with Bizarre Creations' other famous name, Geometry Wars.

When you die in that most beloved of Xbox Live shmups, you're not annoyed because you've lost a life – you're annoyed because it kills your score combo. You play Geometry Wars to get better at Geometry Wars, and to let the world know about it via your Gamercard. And so it is here. You play The Club not because it's a great action game, but because you want to become better at playing The Club. Running and shooting: that is all it is.

Not tonight, not not tonight.

Lest that sound like it fell through a wormhole from 1994, bear in mind this third-person shooter is, essentially, an experiment – the classical mechanics of an old arcade game dressed in the natty duds of 21st century action gaming. It sounds like a very simple, even one-note affair, but it's attempting something new, forcibly mixing two elements that don't usually hang around together. Turkey and cranberry sauce sounds like a dreadful idea on paper, but hey, it works.

The Club isn't much of a spectator sport. Its player dashes around a drab circuit shooting drab men, earning points or time bonuses for each. Each kill adds to a score multiplier, while each passing second further empties a meter. As the meter drops, so does the multiplier. The solution? Kill better, kill faster. Chain together headshots quickly enough and that meter just won't have a chance to drop.

So for the onlooker, the player merely repeats himself with each run of the level. But as far as the player's concerned, he's improving himself. Each attempt burns a little more of the level layout into his mind, and a little more single-shot-kill reflex into his muscle memory. A half-second saved here, a long-range headshot from there means precious extra points on his final score. That score means everything – his sense of accomplishment, and his reason to try again.

The Club can be pretty bangin'.

It's a very easy game to grasp, but a hard one to master. Your aim needs to be impeccable (at least as much as a thumbstick allows), and your hands and mind quick enough to factor in somersaults and shooting hidden Skull signs along with all the headshotting, if you're to achieve a truly epic score. It's silly enough to suit a boozy post-pub half-hour, but to really take its pulse you'll need to play for several hours straight, day after day.



There's a certain degree of reaching the fabled 'zone' sportsmen chase, of achieving absolute flow. There's little thrill to be had from each individual kill, but your blood really starts pumping when you realise you're doing well, that the ever-present number is bigger than ever before. Picture an Olympic runner – he's probably not particularly enjoying the actual act of sprinting, but his nerves are definitely on ecstatic fire once he realises he's at the front of the pack.

This will prove an immediate turn-off for some. The Club's single-player mode is its core, chasing points to climb ever-higher up online leaderboards – and, of course, the Achievements associated with scoring big numbers. If ever a game was made with Xbox Live in mind, it's this one.

If score-attack games aren't your thing, this just isn't going to tickle your death-fancy. There are ending sequences to unlock, but the throwaway storyline about a secret society who like to watch folks kill each other might as well not exist. It's a single-player game purely for the competitive, not for those who want five to 15 hours of exploration and surprises.

Any colour. As long as it's grey.

Or, indeed, any sort of stealth or tactical thinking – you have to keep on the move at all times. You can clear a level without taking many hits, but that's just not the point of it. Your character (you can choose from a whole bunch, with fairly minor variance in speed, stopping-power and bulletproofiness) can soak up far more hits than any of the legion of easily-killed NPCs – if you're taken down, it's by weight of numbers rather than an equally-matched opponent.

The Club's specialist appeal is further restricted by its fairly dismal appearance. On a technical level, it's fine, but any sense of character was thrown out in the same bathwater that took story with it. The player characters and baddies alike are near-indistinguishable urban gangster types, the levels (split across eight themes) all beige and grey variants of concrete and steel. Take away the number-heavy interface and you'd barely know what game this was. It's just Some Places With Men In. It's surprising it doesn't try to be funnier, or go absolutely crazy on the gore, given how inherently ludicrous its killing-for-points nature is. Perhaps though, that would simply have distracted from the challenge – Project Gotham Racing doesn't, after all, feature any exploding chaffinches or whatnot. As is Bizarre's wont, this plays it entirely straight. Men drop cleanly to the ground when shot, no-one's wearing silly hats and it's a curiously bloodless affair. It's about how it plays, not how it looks. But if it looked better, more people would want to play it.

If your name's not down you're not coming in.

Where The Club really confuses is that its single-player game is its primary multiplayer mode - except you don't actually fight another player in it. You just compete for scoreboard spots against unseen rivals, in a vaguely similar fashion to that seen in Colin McRae: DiRT. The Club does have proper multiplayer modes, but they fall back to more traditional deathmatch fare – you versus a few other players, rather than you and a few other players versus dozens of AI deadbeats. Seven foes with brains just aren't as much fun as seventy without. It's a decent enough man-shoot as they go, but because it lacks the high-speed, high-stakes pressure of the single-player, there's nothing to truly tempt people away from Halo 3 and COD4. Expect its leaderboards to become something of a global obsession, however.

Closing Comments
In a climate where so many current games go gentle on their players, offering easy achievements (and, indeed, Achievements) in the name of entertainment, one that requires hours of concentrated practice is a relative one-off. It’s a one-off that mostly succeeds, but by concentrating only on function and never on form, it denies itself greatness. If the Club 2, should there be one, can stop to laugh at itself occasionally, it’ll be a far finer game. If you don’t have that ice-cold glint in your eye that betrays your need to be The Best, you’ll probably think The Club is rubbish. It’s like a restaurant that only serves fish. If you don’t like fish, you’ll call it a terrible restaurant, regardless of how fine its food is. If you do like fish though, you’ll be over the moon that there’s a place (I resisted saying ‘plaice’ there. I hope you appreciate that) that seems to cater just for you. So: do you like fish?

IGN UK Ratings for The Club (X360)
Rating Description See Our Glorious Home Theater Setup!
out of 10 click here for ratings guideGet Ratings Information
6.0 Presentation
Menus and plot are almost no-frills, fading from memory the second they’re not there. There’s a sense they’re only in here because they have to be.
7.0 Graphics
You won’t go confusing it for an Xbox 1 game – it’s shiny and sharp enough. There’s no visual flair to it, though.
6.0 Sound
Again, the music isn’t something you’ll be whistling on your way to work, but it does the job. The sound effects and voiceovers are entirely forgettable, missing a clear opportunity for ga
7.5 Gameplay
Not for everyone, but it does the job it sets out to do very well. It understands the importance of flow, and once you’ve done a near-perfect run of a level, so will you.
7.0 Lasting Appeal
It’ll become a raison d’etre for some players, but the amount of constant practice needed to maintain a decent position on the leaderboards will soon start to grate for others.
7.2
Decent OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)