The Club Hands-On
We spend some time with a near-finished version of this arcade-style shooter from the makers of Project Gotham Racing.
This is just one of three movies for The Club we've posted today. Collect them all!
Currently scheduled for release in February, The Club is a fast-paced, third-person shooter where you travel to destinations all over the world to take part in deadly underground competitions. Developed by Bizarre Creations, The Club incorporates a combo-based scoring system that rewards both speed and style--not unlike the kudos system in the Project Gotham Racing series of driving games. We recently had an opportunity to spend some quality time with a near-finished Xbox 360 version of The Club, and while we're not entirely convinced that we want to sign up for a full membership just yet, doing so would certainly have some benefits.
Each of The Club's eight playable characters has his own reason for taking part in the tournament, and not all of them are doing so voluntarily. All you really need to know about the combatants, though, is that they each have different speed, strength, and stamina attributes that make them better suited for some events than others. With that said, most of the events play out in much the same way: You are tasked with locating and reaching an exit while killing as many enemies as quickly as possible en route. Different events focus on and reward different aspects of your performances. For example, a speedy character might be a good choice for the "time attack" and "sprint" modes that are played against the clock, but one of the tougher guys might be preferable for "siege" and "survivor" games.
The eight locations that you'll visit on The Club's world tour include a steel mill, the streets of Venice, a disused prison, a wrecked ocean liner, a warehouse, a manor house, a bunker, and a war zone. The environments at each of these locations are quite large, but you'll find that certain areas or routes through them are closed off depending on which game type you're playing. Some of the events force you to take quite a linear route from start to finish, while others give you some freedom to explore. The aforementioned siege mode restricts your movement to a very small area and tasks you with fending off attackers from all sides.
While The Club's locales all look quite different, they share plenty of common traits, including gas canisters that explode when shot and boarded-up doorways to charge through. They also include pickups, such as first aid kits and grenades, as well as an arsenal of pistols, shotguns, and machine guns. Enemies are another common feature, of course, and while their counterparts in other games are doing their best to mimic something resembling a self-preservation instinct, the bad guys in The Club (at least those on the default difficulty setting) are like ducks in a shooting gallery by comparison. Sure, they'll take cover or move around a bit sometimes, but their scripted behavior is more like what you'd expect from a light-gun game than a third-person shooter. The Club's enemies exist only to be shot, to be taken down with melee attacks, and--if you take too long to do either of those things--to drain your health using weapons that aren't nearly as powerful as yours.
But that isn't necessarily a criticism because The Club isn't a game that wants you to spend your time moving around stealthily and picking off enemies from range. Rather, The Club is game that encourages up close and personal gunplay. Through its arcade-style scoring system, it encourages strings of kills that are separated by no more than a few seconds. For example, killing the first enemy in a level might award you 1,000 points, but if you're fast enough, that score will be multiplied by two the next time you kill, then three, then four, and so on until you're earning huge numbers of points for even the ugliest of kills. The actual points you earn for a kill vary with the range and difficulty of the shot. Bonus points are also awarded for headshots and for kills that come immediately after you've performed a forward roll or a quick 180 turn.
Although there are plenty of enemies for you to use as target practice in The Club, that doesn't mean there's an endless supply of them queuing up to keep your combos alive. Quite often, in fact, you'll find yourself sprinting through a level looking for your next kill as your combo meter starts to "bleed," hemorrhaging score multipliers at a rate that really adds a sense of urgency to the proceedings. Respite in these sparsely populated areas will often come in the form of somewhat hidden skull icons (they look like little road signs) that count as kills when you shoot them. Memorizing the locations of these will undoubtedly be the key to achieving leaderboard-topping scores when The Club goes online next month. Figuring out the optimum routes through each level and deciding on favorite character/weapon combinations will also be key. Replay value certainly looks to be something that The Club will have plenty of, then, which is just as well considering most games take only a few minutes.
In addition to the single-player tournament mode that we played on this occasion, The Club will feature system link and online multiplayer support (including team-based games), as well as a split-screen option for up to four players. You can also opt to replay any solo event over again until you master it, as well as create custom tournament playlists using any of the levels and weapons that you've unlocked.
Because we've been playing the Xbox 360 version, we can also report that The Club boasts no fewer than 50 different achievements, many of which involve completing different tournaments or levels on each of the game's four difficulty settings or with multiple characters. There are some more inventive ones as well, and several that require you to put your skills to the test online. We look forward to bringing you more information on The Club as its release date gets closer.
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