Title The Club Date 03.21.2008 Genre Action, Third-person Shooter Platform Xbox 360 Developer Bizarre Creations Publisher SEGA

The Club is a game created by Bizarre Creations that gives off first impressions of something wildly different than the games that Bizarre became well known for. (For those unaware, Bizarre are the creators of the popular Project Gotham Racing series) The Club is a game with the thinnest of stories to hold it up, and a concept that initially looks like a throwback to arcade shooters. However, by the time all was said and done I felt like I was playing a racer. I was just using my feet for tires and shooting people in the head was the stand in for the perfect drift. The delightful kudos system of PGR is replaced by points and combos and the AI drivers are replaced by mindless enemies that serve no purpose other than to stand in your way. The game is not good, and most people will grow tired of it within 30 minutes, it's a shame because initially the game looked like it might have been interesting, and to see it finish like this is sad.

Graphically the game is a mess. The environments the game takes place in, while not inspired, get the job done fine and are actually pretty nice to look at. However, the character models are not nearly as good. The camera is so far zoomed in that they take up a good half of the screen. They have a decent amount of detail to them, but their appearance is entirely forgettable and they have a strange plastic appearance to them. Since the game is a third person shooter the camera hovers behind and above/right of the characters shoulder, so you see a lot of back while playing. Almost every character has absolutely nothing interesting going on back there. Some characters is just one generic color, the others might have a few letters. Topping off the annoying character models are the enemies. While the game has eight different levels with different enemies in each, there are a grand total of about two variations in each stage. Animations aren't so hot either. While playing I ran into countless clipping problems, and everything in the game has pretty much two animations. Run and shoot. Enemies flinch a little when they get shot and rag doll when they die. Perhaps the team spent more time on optimization than the basics, as at least the frame-rate hold up extremely well during gameplay and I don't recall any instances of slowdown during my time with the game.

The audio is another mixed bag. The music present is trying to be edgy but comes off as cheesy. There only being about three tracks makes me glad for custom soundtracks as they all sound virtually identical and add nothing to the game. The guns themselves don't really sound like guns. It's a difficult thing to describe, but there's a certain feeling of power missing from these weapons that you're supposedly singlehandedly destroying mobs upon mobs of people with. Voice acting is virtually missing from the game. Enemies have about five different things they'll shout out (not much to say other than URK when being shot) and I can't recall hearing any of the main characters actually speak during the course of the game. The only real voice acting in the game comes from "The Secretary" who seems to be the public face of The Club and he's delightfully evil in how he sounds and really makes you realize how much control he has over your character. It's just too bad what writing is there isn't very strong. (See: writing 101)
 
Speaking of controls, they're a bit sluggish. While the general controls are fairly standard a few things really, really bugged me about them. First off, targeting is slow, yes, the game rewards you for precision shooting, but at a certain point you need to be able to quickly turn around and shoot the guy who sneaked up behind you with a shotgun quickly. For that there's a button, but it never seems to work right and I end up facing the wrong way, disoriented from the excessive blur and it takes me longer to get the kill like that than to just turn around manually. Many of the context sensitive actions, like jumping over walls or breaking through them are all mapped to the same button, which works fine as a giant indicator pops up on screen when you can actually use them.

All of this ties together into a presentation that's really, really trying to be cool by being edgy. It tries to give off a "This is hardcore so I'm cool" kind of vibe to it. A select few will like it, but I think it comes across as a bit archaic and out of place in the genre it's trying to represent.

What is that Genre? Oh, well, it's kind of a throwback on old arcade shooters. The premise is there's some corporation out there which has enough power to put on this tournament of deaths where the combatants are awarded points for stylishly and quickly killing as many enemies as possible. Oh, did I mention the tournaments are in broad daylight? In public places? Like Venice? Yeah, the concept is a bit out there and isn't fleshed out at all, but I can forgive that, that's not the point of the game. The point is to run through the levels and get as many points as quick as possible. The main offering is "Tournament" which has you run through eight different areas with a number of small events in each. Some events ask you to run laps around a course killing for more time, others ask you to just get to the exit. Others tell you to defend your position. The game claims to have six different types of these events, but I can't tell the difference between a few. Namely Siege and Survival. I have no clue how they're any different (defend your location, don't die). The tournament takes about three hours to go through and there's no real incentive to go back other than the unlocked "real" difficulty setting. There's no penalty for not winning, you get the next location as long as you survive, which really isn't hard at all. Enemies serve as more of a source of points than a threat.

You can take an absolute beating and not even flinch. Hell, even getting tagged by a rocket doesn't make your guy flinch, on the default difficulty he more or less laughs at it taking a measly tenth of your max health. And there lies the problem with the game. Extremely short (with long load times to boot), linear levels coupled with no reward for performing well, and no penalty for performing poorly. Unless you absolutely feel you need the top spot on the leaderboards, there's no reason to replay the mode. Furthering the boring repetition of the game, none of the characters feel any different. They all have different stats, like speed, stamina, and strength, but in actual play, none of them really make much of a difference. Don't get me wrong here, what's been presented here can be fun, it just vanishes in a hurry. There's just not much content and what's there isn't worth looking at twice.

If you feel like it you can take the game onto Xbox live, but it's just not a lot of fun chasing everyone around the map trying to kill them. The gameplay was designed for quick matches of killing weaklings, not tanks running around shooting each other. If you're a big achievement fan there's some stuff there to get, but you'll really want to avoid some of them. (Like the No, seriously achievement, 10001 kills in ranked matches) There's much, much better ways to spend your time online with games.

This game arrives shortly after the storm of high quality titles of this winter, but those titles are still riding the wave of success, and The Club doesn't do anything to distinguish itself as something that's original or worth your attention. While those who love replaying levels over and over again to reach perfection (and #1 on the leaderboards), this is something I could only really recommend to those who loved getting their butt kicked by old NES games, but even here, it's not a game over you need to worry about, it's a simple rank. The fun doesn't last long at this club, return customers are few, and everything else about it falls a bit below par for the course. Even if you're really excited for this title, it's something that at best you're going to want to rent. Avoid this club and wait for something else to spend your hard earned money on.

Game Score

C-

Reviewed By: Jesse Littlefield