Partly NSFW due to google-images
Since NihonTiger challenged us to a nice little contest and I've been wanting to tell you about this game, this was the perfect moment to get my writing on...


So onto The Club... because we all want to know the answer to the one question that keeps us all busy when considering games: Does it suck???




The Premise

Run... Shoot... Kill... Score! That's it basically, and at the end of Score, you try to repeat the sequence before your combo-timer runs out. Well there's more to it, but thats the basic action.

There's a secret elite community of rich bastards that has infused the characters in The Club with a micro-explosive to force them to play blood-games ( if they don't, or you fail at the objective, your character explodes ). So you're forced to survive through a series of tournaments only to stay alive. This just leaves one thing to the imagination of the player, its pretty clear how they force the "player" to 'play' in The Club ( if he doesn't he explodes ) but the real question is, how the fuck to they convince all that cannon-fodder to keep working for them????

There's no real story to talk about to be honest, but as you'll see soon enough, a story is completely useless for this game... its a typical arcade-no-bullshit-hyper-speed-game.



The Game

There's one thing you have to do in The Club: Kill!
You get a score based upon where you hit your opponent ( headshot is worth more then stomach-shot duh ), from what distance you hit him ( the further the better ) and the type of opponent ( for instance there's guys with a bullet-proof shield that has like one little window to see through and if you headshot that guy through that window you get a great score :-) ) After your first kill, a combo-bar loads up that will be valid for about 5 seconds, if you make another kill during this time, you combo-multiplier will rise one level ( with a max of 15 ), if you don't make the kill, every second the level of the combo will go down until its back at 1.

As you can immagine this makes very frantic and speedy gameplay...

The main mode of The Club is 'Tournament', there's 8 different locations on which you can do a tournament, every tournament is built up from 6 events, which can be 5 different events: Sprint, Time Attack, Survivor, Siege, and Run the Gauntlet. but actually Siege and Survivor are pretty much identical, and Sprint and Run the Gauntlet are also pretty alike... So I'd say there's 3 gamemodes: "Get through the level" ( Sprint & Run the Gauntlet ) makes you storm through a path, the difference is mainly the while doing it in Sprint, you're supposed to score as much as possible by scoring kills while with Run the Gauntlet you do the same but you've got a timelimit.

The second SP-game-mode is "Stay Alive" ( Siege & Survivor ), honestly I don't know any difference between these 2 modes, you get a limited area to move around in, 2 minutes of time a load of bad-guys and about 2 minutes of time that you have to get through without getting killed. The Last mode is called Time Attack, it lets you start of with about 30 seconds of time left on the clock ( counting down ), for every kill you get 3 seconds bonus-time, and this way you have to complete a certain number of laps, so basicly the idea is to score at least one kill every 3 seconds, which creates a brilliant kill-rush-run-gameplay-mechanic :-D

Then theres a few MP-modes but to be honest the MP-segment of this game is the least fun of it because it makes it almost impossible to keep a combo going, and that's the whole idea of the game :-)



The Controls

The controls are about what you would expect from any thirdperson-shooting game, but they are spot-on, except for the melee-attack, that just fucking blows...

By using the A-button you can do a roll, and killing somebody right after or during that also adds to the score you get from the kill. In some instances you'll be able to use the A-button as an action button ( to smash through a door or jump acreoss a handrail ), all this gives you more score and it works more then well enough to be used the whole time :-)



The Ghraphics and Sound

here's a video so you can have a look at the graphics (and get an idea of the massive action in this game):


As you can see the graphics are pretty solid, however, you won't notice jack shit of it because you'll just be to busy having fun and shooting badguys...




The Conclusion

So no Story Mode, 3 real SP-events ( 6 according to SEGA ), repettitive gameplay, cliché-characters ( gambling american, huge russian, otaku japanese, dreadlocked african etc etc etc ) sound like a pretty boring game... The thing is, the gameplay-system is so insanely addictive and just plain fun that I totally forget about all that crap... Who need story when your combo is dropping back to 1, who cares that the guy you're playing is a stereotype of a racial group when you finally get that 15X max-combo?

Everytime you run through the level ( on same difficulty ) the enemies will be on kind-of-the-same-spot but perfecting a level is almost impossible, its a brilliant way of keeping you come back for more! I've caught myself just playing the same level 10/20 times in a row just to get a higher score then the last run...


Also I found these 2 pictures while looking for images for 'The Club' via google-images, and any game that brings up shots like this is a great game in my eyes:



Final Verdict: very very minor Suckage

but only if you want a useless story, more useless non-cliché-character or anything that would break down on the gameplay... So basicly fixing any of these would just make the game worse... I own it and I absolutely LOVE it, COD4-MP is slow and boring compared to this game's SP-modes and its become my quick-adrenaline-fix-provider of choice...

So actually the game ROCKS as long as you can forget about all that stuff that's necessary for so many other games but really completely uneccesary for this game :-)