The Club Impressions
- January 08, 2008 15:40 PM PST
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What does The Club have to offer that I can't get from mega-hit games like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4? The answer: A lot more than you'd expect.
I had some alone time with The Club several weeks ago and was mildly impressed by the game's fast-paced arcade roots. The character design, gunplay and level design were all very impressive. But, the point scoring, arcade style shoot-em up experience exhausted my interest. At the time, The Club showed a lot of potential, but I was concerned that it would suffer from a lack of story driven gameplay, and go mostly unnoticed. I can say now, after playing a more up-to-date version of the game, that The Club has exceeded my expectations and is well on its way to being a must-own title.
The Club is unlike any other current-gen shooter. Think of it as Gears of War meets Winback -- that's right, Winback. You might not remember the early third-person shooter title for the Nintendo 64, but it was a great game and one of my old favs. Where Winback and Gears of War encouraged the use of cover, The Club encourages balls-out sprinting and split-second decisions. The Club rewards players for making headshots while sprinting full-speed through a barrage of bullets. While many first-person shooters encourage the player to be tactical, The Club encourages the player to race through levels head-first blasting enemies as quickly as possible.
You must feed your Killbar because it is very, very hungry. The way the scoring works is by maintaining a kill combo. Say you kill three enemies in a row; your combo jumps to 3x and your total points are tripled. Once you get that combo, however, your Killbar begins to slowly decrease and you must get more kills before the timer runs out and your combo is lost. The goal is to race through each level killing enemies as fast as you can to keep your score multiplier up. The highest multiplier I got was 12x, at that point the Killbar drains so fast that you have to find another kill in a matter of seconds or your combo will be lost. Look for icon targets called "Skullshots" that act like enemies to maintain your combo and get points.
The controls are tight and fluid and make the gunplay an absolute delight. While playing The Club all you really need to know is how to aim, shoot and sprint. Those actions are divided amongst the trigger buttons so you won't be forced to take your right thumb from the joystick during heavy shootouts. I learned the controls instantly and at no point did I feel as if they were a hindrance to the gameplay. Not even Halo could give me such a perfect feeling. The downside to this is that we lose a variety of actions. There is no ducking for cover and peeking out to take hidden shots as in Gears of War - a capability that I found myself wanting. Because of this, monitoring your health is practically removed from the game's strategy. Although in the most advanced levels it's much harder to stay alive and players must be able to get that quick kill at a distance to make up for not having cover.
The graphics are sharp and the design is well suited for a game that is based on intense action. When you sprint, it's as if the camera man behind you must also sprint to keep up. The result is a camera that shakes, (but not too much) to make you feel as though you're running for your life. The enemies look great; they are visible from a distance so you can be looking at the inside of a massive warehouse and easily spot the five enemies that are hundreds of feet away ducking behind boxes. Lastly the character models are awesome. Each playable character (there are about eight in all) has a unique personality and background story, and all of that comes through in their stylish design.
The Club offers several game modes to keep things fresh. There is, of course, multiplayer, which features some solid modes in itself. A unique mode called "Hunter Hunted" is like a deadly game of backwards tag. The player that is "it" earns points every second and must stay alive as long as possible while other players try to kill him in order to become "it". There is also tournament mode, probably the closest resemblance of a story mode. In tournament mode you choose your favorite character and compete against the rest of the field for high scores in all of the game's intricate levels. Here you'll unlock levels in Gunplay mode. Gunplay mode is basically create-a-gametype where you choose the level, the type of game (speed run, max points, etc.) the type of gun and the difficulty. You can save Gunplay mode and, I'm hoping, trade them over Xbox Live/PSN.
The Club is a truly unique next-gen shooter and for that reason it both benefits from the modern advancements of the shooting genre and subverts direct competition with untouchables like Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3. Expect this title to make a splash when it drops in late February.
