If you scorned dreams of joining Fight Club because it was too sissy for your taste, The Club is here to take you away to a land of never-ending killing. The arcade-style third-person shooter is a return to classic 'action first, story second' gameplay, delivering adrenaline-pounding action along the way.
The basic premise of the game is to kill everyone you see as quickly, accurately, and cleverly as possible. You make your way through levels, killing baddies along the way. The game bases the score of each kill on three criteria: style, distance, and multiplier. While making your way through the levels, it is almost a necessity to roll to avoid gunfire, or make quick turns to head in the opposite direction quickly. The game gives bonus points for killing just after these quick-to-react situations. Sadly, the stylized killing action is not nearly as good as it should be. The game puts an emphasis on tricked-out killing, just after a dive-roll or 180-degree turn, but they never feel half as good as the explosive killing sprees in Stranglehold.
The game also puts a premium on how accurate you are with the crosshairs. Shooting a thug a few feet away from you is not nearly as impressive as nailing a headshot on a potential sniper two stories up, from across the screen. The game does a solid job recognizing the difficulty in the shots you take, and rewards you accordingly. Environmental kills, which sadly only come in the form of explosive barrels found through each level, are also worth increased points. The scoring also incorporates a multiplier system to reward those who keep the kills coming in rapid succession. Each time you kill a baddie, your multiplier is increased by one. From that moment on, the multiplier starts ticking downward, eventually dropping whole numbers for each second you go without shedding blood.
Clearing an entire room of enemies feels great, but the ever-ticking multiplier leaves you little time to search for weapons crates, let alone stand around and gloat. The trick is to move quickly and efficiently through the levels, always keeping one eye on your multiplayer, one eye on your health, and hopefully grow a third eye to actually handle the shooting and watching for bonus 'skullshots'; used for further boosting your multiplier. Because of all that goes into the scoring of a round, a decent amount of strategy and skill goes into your becoming a valued member of The Club.
In many ways, The Club is a retro title. It certainly looks like a next-gen game, but the 'high score' chase of it all recalls a time long before Microsoft dreamed up Achievement Points. No worries, achievement whores, there are plenty of those pushing you along, too. The difference here is that your goal is not just completing the levels, but to complete them better than the other opponents; as evidenced by the highest score. At the end of each completed round, your score increases based on your remaining health, your accuracy, and the final multiplier you finished with.
The meat of the single player experience comes in the form of the Tournament mode. Players blast their way through eight locations, each serving as their own tournament. Each tournament has six individual events, which is where red flags as to the game's replay value start waving. Although it would seem as though there are six different game modes, they play so similarly that there are essentially three different game modes. Each event either asks you to race through the level from start to finish while killing as much as possible, stay in a confined location and survive until the clock runs down to zero, or run through the level to complete it before the timer runs out. The lack of variety makes for a tiring gaming affair.
