The Club is loosely driven by a story about an underground ‘fight club’ where combatants from around the world face off with weapons to win matches and tournaments in time and score based death matches. The characters you have at your disposal are colourful, to say the least, and each will play and react differently with emphasis on different areas. Some players will be more speed based, and some will be tanks being able to take far more hits. This has a strong impact on your performance in tournaments, and finding the character which suits your playing style is vital.
In The Club your score is clocked up by performing style kills. Head shots will net you more points than a standard body shot, and with each kill you will push your combo meter even higher. This will multiply the score you receive for each kill, but as you romp through the level your combo will constantly be receding unless you actively push it continually higher by making kills, and hitting special artifacts hidden around the level. Special score moves such as "last bullet", where your final bullet makes a kill, or "ric-o-slay" where you make a kill by ricocheting a bullet around a corner really spice things up and help push your score even higher. This forces you to play fast, stringing together kills and constantly on the move. Initially this can be disheartening as it is a big move from the usual shooters with cover systems and the like, but it won’t take too long until you are winning tournaments and matches and feeling pretty darn smug.
Different game modes challenge you in very different ways. The focus is on tournaments where you play offline against the AI opponents, each of you trying to net the biggest score. This is where the different skills that the characters have come into a league of their own. One character may be super fast in the time trial type mode, where you have to pick up ‘clocks’ and make kills to extend your time to get to the finish. Your tank character may be super strong and hold out easier in the siege game mode, where you defend a location for a designated amount of time against hordes of enemies. Or simply sprint where you make it to the level exit and collect as many points as possible.
You can also tackle The Club in a single event. In this mode your score will then be posted online and you can compare it to your friends as well as the rest of the world. It was very satisfying for us to see our score ranked and it doesn’t take long to begin to improve in leaps and bounds. This game, seems steep at first, but really is quick to learn. The final game-mode is gunplay in which you can select the levels, the weapons and you have no rigid structure. You simply play how you want to play. Bizarre Creations themselves say this is the perfect “back from the pub” gameplay, and they are probably right.
A range of different levels keep the game interesting, each being substantially different to the last. Every level has been well thought through and planned out to suit the game style. You will battle on a wrecked ocean liner, a decaying German steel mill, a 1950’s Soviet bunker and others, coming to a total of 8 different levels. This is a decent number considering that knowing the levels reasonably well is the key to success. What makes all this really shine though is the great graphics engine that the game is built on. Everything looks great and you won’t notice any graphical glitches. The 60 frames per second that the game runs at also makes for a completely smooth experience. A bonus is the rag doll physics that have been implemented, that will see your character go flying in multiplayer.
Yes, the multiplayer. This is the part we were most anticipating from having played the demo, and as good as it is, it does disappoint. We struggled to have a good multiplayer game as either games weren’t existent or we were pummelled into oblivion by some guys rocker launcher camping. It took us a while to figure out how to solve the rocket launcher dilemma, and it has to be said, finding the weapons to do the job on the level was satisfying. There are free for all games, or team games with modes like "team fox hunt", whereby each team has a fox onside which they have to protect and the other team has to kill, while protecting their own fox. The lack of online games is really the biggest downfall, as there is real promise here.
The overall experience is fantastic. Bizarre Creations have gone out on a limb with this title and it has turned out fantastic. It is so distinctly different that it is a breath of fresh air for the genre. Unfortunately it seems that many gamers are happier sticking with the tried and true and therefore the online games can be a bit quiet. Hopefully this will pick up, and until then the tournaments and single-player are solid enough and challenging enough to keep us coming back to this title. Bizarre Creations have done almost everything right with The Club, and it would be a shame to see the title drop of the radar due to mainstream games like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3.
