Introduction

    Welcome to the Club. An organization responsible for setting up tournament style gauntlet death matches. With a heavy focus on gathering as many points as you can and doing it in the most stylish way possible. Created by Bizarre creations one can clearly see the influence from its Project Gotham racing series. Your in a race to the finish, your characters have different stats, you get style points and your competing against other characters in a tournament. Except this time replace the cars with 8 weapon wielding maniacs, kudos’ with a combo meters, and the checkered flag with an exit sign. The first game I’ve played that would fall under the 3rd person shooter racer, with a huge emphasis on points, combos and multipliers.

There isn’t much to the story of the game. All you need to know the head of the Club known only as the Secretary sets up multi round events in a specific environment.  Your goal: get to the exit while mowing down countless enemies. You’ll be running through steel mills, run down factories, downtown and more.  You’re thrown into a competition with 7 other competitors to see who can run through a level the fastest all while scoring as many points as possible and keeping your combo meter alive. Multiple weapons, detailed architecture, several ways of maintain your multipliers and great level design all lead to an overall interesting concept. Let’s see how it turns out.

Gameplay and Design

At its heart The Club is a 3rd person shooter. You start off by choosing a character and are placed into a tournament to see who can rack up the most points. The way you get those points and maintain them is The Clubs claim to fame.

As your running through a level you build up your combo meter. The more stylish kills you get i.e. headshots, long distance, last bullets kill will build up your score quickly. The thing is that the combo meter (known as the killbar in The Club) will quickly deplete itself if you’re not shooting more bad guys, blowing up barrels, busting through wooden barriers, etc. So if you’ve built up a 15X combo and decide to take a break your meter will quickly go down to 14X, 13X, etc until it has ended and you’ve lost the combo. Now the great thing is that there are tons of enemies all over the place for you to take down. So even if you lose a few levels on your multiplier you can still quickly and easily build it back up again. There is a good mix of skill and patience required to play this properly. Additionally there are a lot of hidden Skull icons to also find for those with really good aims. Finding these will increase your score even more. Naturally the goal is to reach the end of the stage with the highest score and multiplier possible. Your points are tallied up at the end of the round and after several stages the winner is declared.