The Club Hands-On

The Club is an interesting proposition. Bizarre Creations, the team best known for the Project Gotham Racing series, has decided to take what it has learnt from those games and apply it to the action genre. The result is a game that you’ll be able to blast through fairly quickly, but one that you’ll hopefully want to come back to again and again. It’s a risky proposition, but from what we’ve seen so far, Bizarre might just be able to pull it off.

The premise for the game is the idea of modern-day gladiatorial combat organised by the world’s richest and most powerful people. Entrepreneurs, politicians, movie stars–they all use their abundance of wealth and influence to hold bloody deathmatches to satisfy their bloodlust. Eight combatants are recruited–both willingly and unwillingly–to fight, and the game will follow them as they travel the world and engage in this highly illegal extreme sport.

The Club takes the action genre and refines it to provide pure arcade thrills.

If the setup for The Club sounds a little dark, it’s not really that important–it merely facilitates the game’s arcade gameplay. Each level has been designed like a racetrack, and you need to approach them with the same mentality: take them at speed. You need to kill enemies in succession as quickly as possible, with more points awarded for speed and accuracy. The points system works using a multiplier that increases with each successive kill. The trouble is, this multiplier is constantly dropping in value, so you need to kill again and again in order to retain it. The higher the value, the quicker it diminishes, and the game has an increasingly frantic feel as you struggle to keep your multiplier up.

Although it sounds relatively simple, it can take some adjustment to get your head around the concept. The layout of the levels remains constant every time you play, and as with racing games, it can take a few attempts to attain that perfect lap. The enemies always pop out from the same positions, and wall-mounted targets can be shot at in quiet periods to retain your multiplier bonus. After a few plays through the mansion level that was shown, we began to memorise the optimum route through the level, with substantial jumps in the final score each time. If you’re the sort of person who obsessively chases high scores, you’re going to love this game.

If you play games for story, emotional involvement, or just for casual fun, then The Club’s gameplay is probably going to leave you cold. The concept of repetition, perfect runs, and high scores is, well, a bit retro these days, although it’s something that Bizarre has succeeded with in PGR and Geometry Wars. Though it seems like the perfect concept for an Xbox Live Arcade title, Bizarre has invested a good deal of time to polish the game, and it will be released as a full game early next year.

We got to play only that one level at a recent Sega preview event, but the Bizarre Creations rep talked us through the rest of the game’s features. The structure has been based on that of Street Fighter II, with eight playable characters who each feature different strength and agility ratings. Judge Dredd writer Gordon Rennie was drafted in to create the characters, and the potential finalists were all sent around Bizarre for approval. However, rather than settling for the characters with the most approval, the team intentionally chose characters from both ends of the spectrum in order to polarise players. The rep said that they wanted players to have strong opinions about the cast, and intentionally created each character to have a “love ‘em or hate ‘em” quality. However, Bizarre had no answer when asked why there are no female characters in the final lineup.

Kill as many people as you can using a variety of weapons, including these gun emplacements.

The levels themselves offer a nice mix of locations, from German steel mills to English manor houses, as well as warehouses and ocean liners. As they did with Project Gotham, Bizarre traveled around the world and took reference photographs for each location. We especially liked Bizarre’s explanation of how The Club’s organisers manage to hold an event in the middle of Venice. Their wealth and power let them buy a section of the city that was falling underwater and seal it off. In turn, they invested money to renovate it and laid on fireworks to hide the noise of gunfire and explosions.

Although our look at the game was quite limited, we managed to sneak a peek at the game modes that will be included in the final game. The game mode we played was sprint, where the idea is to race through the level and not worry too much about killing every last enemy. Siege will take place in a more restricted area, and enemies will pour into the level until you die. Survivor is like siege but on a larger area, whereas run the gauntlet is all about racing to the finish as quickly as possible without dying. Our favourite mode from the description is time attack–you explode if the timer hits zero, and the only way to add seconds to your life is to keep killing people.

The Club holds a lot of promise, and we certainly had a lot of fun playing the game against other people at the preview event. It will definitely appeal to fans of old-school arcade shooters, and its stylish design and high-octane action may succeed in pulling in a few other fans, too. We hope to see more of the game ahead of its release, which is currently scheduled for Q1 2008.

-If Its Games