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Quick. Challenging. Intense.
That is the mantra of The Club, the latest bizarre creation from Bizarre Creations, best known for the Phantom Gotham series, and not as well as they deserve to be known for their last third person shooter, Fur Fighters. I'm not going to use the tired cliché about "arcade style action" to describe The Club, since that metaphor is about ten years overdue for retirement. In some ways, it's closer to the classic console games, which were all about killing baddies and racking up points, without any long cut-scenes or hour long levels to slog through. The sort of action that's been shifted to handhelds these days, where you can get ten minutes of satisfaction before work.
The gunfire and enemy taunts are all low key, so you're sure to hear the announcer's praises and warnings, and especially the tick tick tick of your combo meter as it slips away.
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Those ten minutes are going to feel much longer and sweeter here. Unless you're taking a stroll through the Casual difficulty, The Club demands every drop of your concentration. You move through eight different environments under five possible goals: Sprint, Time Attack, Siege, Survivor, and Run the Gauntlet. Your basic challenge is always the same: keep shooting thugs to raise your combo meter and earn enough points to overcome the mission's goal, or the scores of your friends on the online leaderboards. Pull off stylish kills, like head shots or kills after a diving roll, and you'll earn more points. While every moment your combo meter is ticking down into oblivion, and the higher you raise it, the quicker it'll drop. Sometimes you'll be racing against the clock and others will confine you to a small section of the map while enemies rush in around you, but no matter what happens keep that combo rolling. There's tournament mode for a series of challenges, single mode for perfecting any challenge you've unlocked, and the ability to build custom lists of events and stages, with your own selectable arsenal and score goals. Each proceeding difficulty adds to the enemy count, making it easier to achieve massive scores, but harder to stay alive. The one strange omission, especially coming from the home of PGR4, is the lack of replays. When you see the top spot on the leaderboards has eight million to your pitiful two, you want to see how he pulled it off, but you're just going to have to learn the hard way.
The shooting is perfection. There are eight characters to choose from, each with their own little nuances to help you find the avatar that's just right for you. The options screen is full of fine tuning, from changing the color of the targeting cursor, to adjusting the movement sensitivity for both from the hip shooting and aimed in view. This means you can make it fairly loose for moving around and tighten it up when zooming in for those all important headshots, as well as going southpaw if you're so inclined. This results in the sort of precision shooting thought impossible with a controller. Now you can aim, shoot, reload, roll, sprint, quick turn around, and hurl grenades with the greatest of ease, so the controls are never a barrier between you and the top score.
The visuals are probably the weakest part of the whole package. Take away the next-gen gloss and it could have been on the original Xbox, though glass breaks and concrete chips in a satisfying manner. I think the real weakness here is focus on realism. The Club didn't need more than its nearly non-existent story, but it should have been more stylized; a bit of Suda51 if you will (the creator of Killer 7 and No More Heroes). Though the sound design is wonderfully sublime. For instance, I'm sure the only reason there's music is so the player isn't distracted by the absence of it. The gunfire and enemy taunts are all low key, so you're sure to hear the announcer's praises and warnings, and especially the tick tick tick of your combo meter as it slips away.
With all of the game mechanics geared to wiping out legions of faceless thugs, it's easy to assume the multiplayer would be a tacked on bit of business. Though it isn't as refined as the single player portion, sprinting through the levels and unleashing hell on live opponents is still plenty thrilling. There's also no shortage of modes. Kill Match is your basic deathmatch (with a team-based version), while Score Match includes the combo counter to encourage rapid killing if you want the top score. Hunter Hunted is a bullet-driven game of tag, where you need to kill and then keep alive the longest to score points. Team Fox Hunt is a tense game of VIP, and Team Capture is straight up capturing control points. Team Siege has you holding a set location while the other team rains death down upon you, and Team Skullshots has you protecting your own targets while demolishing the opposing ones. Four player split-screen and system link support are included for those lacking Live.
The Club is one of those rare games where the demo is truly representative of the final product. If you loved running through the demo level, popping people's heads and working to beat your own high score, then you will love having so many more events, levels, and characters to choose from, with online mode to chill with. If you didn't care for the demo, then this club isn't for you. |
