Welcome to the Club - your new addiction.
There are 4 play modes on the main menu - Tournament Mode, aka campaign / story mode, Gunplay, allowing you to alone, or with friends, build up your own playlist and fight for points, and the self explanatory Single Event and Multiplayer Modes.
Firstly, let's look at the single player modes. The actual types of contest you can play are Sprint, where you rack up points and attempt to reach the end, Time Attack, in which you go around a few laps, picking up time by shooting the time-shots, killing enemies or walking through floating clocks, Run The Gauntlet, where you have a short amount of time to reach the end of the map, and also there's Siege and Survival, which are confusingly similar, as you defend a certain area for about 2 minutes, against oncoming waves of opponents.
You can play through these modes with a total of 8 characters, with two locked at first. These characters offer different attributes that may help you in your style of play. These attributes are Speed, Strength and Stamina, and are shown at the character select screen in stars, 1-5.
Within the game, you must gain points to get higher on the leaderboard, and these can be awarded by shooting skullshots, or performing stylish kills. For example, rolling on the floor before quickly standing and killing your opponent gives you the 'Death Roll' combo, and performing a quick turn before filling an enemy full of led is a 'Snap-Shot!'. Others include headshots, great shot & crack shot.
Tournament Mode could be played countless times, as 8 different characters on 4 difficulties, and you could be fixed to the TV with the extremely addictive, point racking, blood spilling, shotgun blasting action. And then... you can make your own playlists, and create or beat even more records in gunplay mode! There's no end to the possibility.
Feeling lonely? Check out the multiplayer modes! Offering Xbox Live, Split Screen and System Link, with various Deathmatch and Team modes. Have a good ol' shootout in Kill Mode, play the single-player style with Point Mode, and do so much more! And if that's not exactly what you want in multiplayer, you can battle it out for the high score in your own, or preset Gunplay playlists!
There's so much gameplay options and variables in The Club - you can even change the colour of your crosshair, but there are some bad points about the other parts of the game.
Here's one that I don't care about much, but you might: the arena's are often brown, or grey, and there's not one tropical or even natural location among the lot, perhaps with the exception of Venice.
But there's a few minor faults from me, but I don't think they really do anything to worsen gameplay. As I mentioned earlier, the Siege and Survival Modes are extremely similar, and quite annoying when, for example, you play a Survival Mode, followed by a Siege, as it seems to lack diversity during two separate matches. And although it makes up for it elsewhere, there's no bots on multiplayer, so you can't team with a friend against the computer. You may not mind, but I, personally, have extremely limited access to Xbox Live, so that kinda sucks for me.
However, I did say that it makes up for it elsewhere. And it really does. The Club is a fantasticly addictive, arcade style, guns blazing shoot 'em up that really is a incredible combination of game styles. You'll see plenty of elements from PGR, and in my opinion, have so much more fun along the way.
Note to UK Inhabitants: I got this cheap at £20 from Game.Co.Uk - it's £20 when bought with anything esle in store, so I got 2 packs of batteries, 50p each.