The Club Multiplayer Hands-On

Earlier today, during a visit to Sega of America's San Francisco office, we had an opportunity to check out some of The Club's multiplayer content for the first time. If you've been following our previous coverage of The Club, you'll know that the game's single-player mode employs some quite innovative scoring and combo systems, not entirely unlike those in the developer's Project Gotham Racing series. Having spent more than an hour playing The Club alongside other media this morning, we're pleased to report that these features have also found their way into some of the multiplayer game types, though we're concerned that some of the basics are still missing.

The Club supports up to eight players online in both individual and team-based modes, and you'll find that the game's eight playable characters retain the same attributes online that they do in the single-player game. Your choice of character should be influenced not only by your playing style but also by the game mode chosen. For example, at least one of the modes requires that teams have a mixture of offensive and defensive players. The mode in question is called "team skull shot," and it's one of several modes that we had an opportunity to spend some time with.

In team skull shot, two teams of up to four players are tasked with destroying each other's skullshot signs (just like those in the single-player game, but color coded for each team) while defending their own. The red and blue teams had six skulls each in the game that we played, and--presumably because their locations will be randomized to some extent at the start of each game--their locations aren't revealed to anyone on the minimap until a member of their team has spotted them.

The "warzone" level on which we played team skullshot was unusual in that there was really only one route to take from one team's base to the other: through the middle of a bombed-out railway station. Given that respawn times in this particular mode are upward of six or seven seconds and you're returned to your own base every time you die, this resulted in something of a tug-of-war situation as our teams took turns charging forward, getting mowed down, and then returning fire from defensive positions when they respawned. Unsurprisingly, the members of the winning team were the first to start communicating with each other to establish something resembling a strategy.

A similar level of communication is needed in the other team-based mode that we played, "team fox hunt." In this mode, one player on each team is designated as the fox (think VIP in other shooters you've played) and the other team scores a point for assassinating the fox (two points if the assassin is the enemy fox). If you're playing as one of the foxes, your only unique ability (other than displaying the word "FOX" above your head in large, enemy-friendly letters) is that you can use any health packs you find to take your health well over the 100 percent mark.

The other multiplayer games that we played on this occasion were "kill match," which is just another name for deathmatch, and "hunted killer," which many of you will recognize as a variant on the "tag" theme. The first person to score a kill becomes the target for everyone and scores points for every second he or she can stay alive; whoever kills that player becomes the next target, and so on until someone reaches the preset score limit. Incidentally, the hunted player is always highlighted on the minimaps of the other players, so you can run but you can't hide.

Multiplayer modes confirmed for The Club that weren't shown on this occasion include team kill match, which is team deathmatch; team capture, in which each team will attempt to capture the other's base by holding it for 30 seconds; team siege, in which a team of defenders with only one life each must survive as long as possible against a team of attackers with infinite respawns; and score match, which is a deathmatch in which you'll score points for stylish and difficult kills in the same way that you do in the single-player game. We also didn't get to see The Club's support for split-screen play in action, though we've been furnished with plenty of screenshots confirming that up to four players are supported on a single console.

There are plenty of different multiplayer modes to choose from, and though eight players don't sound like a lot, most of the levels we played on were small enough that the action was rarely anything but fast-paced. However, we're still not entirely sold on some of The Club's controls (aiming can be especially tricky), and many objects that look like they can be vaulted or climbed over (handrails, for example) can't be interacted with in any way, even though you can use identical-looking objects elsewhere. Perhaps our biggest worry right now, though, is that while The Club's arsenal is certainly sizeable, very few of the weapons we've sampled to date really feel like they pack a punch.