The James Logan Courier

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

"THE CLUB"
For: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC
From: Bizarre Creations/Sega
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood, strong language, violence)

"The Club" is a fun game stuck in an obnoxious game's body. And if you can will yourself into ignoring the obnoxious part — which, incidentally, is also the game's purported selling point — you might find a way to enjoy what's left.

At its base, "The Club" is a typical third-person shooter with a typical premise: stay alive and reach the end of a level — in some cases, before time runs out.

The hook, in this case, is that in addition to being shot at, you're being scored as well. "The Club" rewards you points for stylish and impressive kills, and rewards you exponentially more for stringing those kills together. Achieving a target score is as paramount as staying alive. Total mastery means constantly sprinting through the levels, taking down enemies as quickly as possible without any thought to taking cover, finding secret areas or doing other things that come naturally in other shooters.


Unfortunately, this mastery comes with a price, and that price's name is fun. "The Club" is made well, with better-than-average controls, fun level designs and enough weaponry to make an army blush. But when excelling at the game means mindlessly scrambling through that well-made level, ignoring most of that weaponry and doing more to appease a combo meter that fades entirely too quickly while your character all-too-slowly reloads his gun, it goes mostly to waste. "The Club" would have been far better off prioritizing shooting proficiency over simple recklessness instead of vice versa. (See "Stranglehold" for an example of how much better that reverse balance works.)

Fortunately, though it's obnoxiously noisy, the combo system can be ignored if you'd rather play at a more intellectually engaging pace. Achieving target scores is practically automatic if you play well enough to survive, so you can brush the whole system aside unless you're bent on topping the leaderboards. Given the complete lack of back story in the tournament mode, it's not clear why you'd even want that top score, though the pursuit does add some replay value to an otherwise short experience.

Things are a little more familiar on the multiplayer front, where a host of traditional modes join a mode that prioritizes the combo system over all else. "The Club's" sound technical design translates well to the online arena, though only time will tell if the niche concept prevents it from achieving the level of community needed to give the multiplayer any lasting value.

(c) 2008, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.