The Club

Any club that will let David Hollingworth in isn’t worth joining. Or, for that matter... playing.

It’s always great to see game developers innovating old genres, and when news of Bizarre Creations’ The Club reached us, we were quietly intrigued. Taking a leaf or two from modern racing games like Project Gotham Racing (another Bizarre Creations creation – see what we did there?), The Club rewards players for stacking up quick kills and cool combos in a third person shooter. The plot’s basic – rich people, apparently, like watching nameless bullet-magnets get shot up and you’re one of the shining lights in the sport – but that, we hoped, simply meant the gameplay could shine...

What we’ve ended up with, however, is more of a dull glow that could desperately use a lot more plot to flesh out any reason for actually playing the game.

The bloodsport routine’s nothing new, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done well. Manhunt is a perfect case in point, that actually managed to shoehorn some pretty decent story in between all the shivving and plastic-bag-asphyxiating. The Club hints at greater depths of story – some of the eight characters you can choose from seem to have all manner of skeletons in their respective closets – but this never actually comes out in the game once you settle on one. Why is Finn getting beaten like a red-headed step child as the game starts? What’s the deal with the pretty-boy twins? You’ll never know.



Similarly, while you might expect that the game may come with some kind of twist that actually provides commentary on the morality of The Club, in reality you’re plum out of luck. Once you finish the game – which is monstrously short – the only replay comes from being able to go through with different characters. It’s an arcade experience taken to arcade extremes of transience and pointlessness, where the only drive to win is the beat the high score.

Which would be fine, were it not for the fact that the gameplay itself is as short-sighted as to the game’s premise.



A typical level sees you needing to wrack up kills, to build your combo-rating, all the while maintaining enough pace to get to the next set of enemies before the aforementioned combo runs down. Headshots, close range kills and other trick-shots are all rewarded, and there are usually special combo-boosting targets ranged about each level.

All well and good, and you might think, with some clever level design – and the game does have some nice ones – that random spawns and weapon load outs might deliver some interesting gun fights. That is, if there were any randomness.

That’s right, each level spawns enemies identically. This might be in an attempt to make the game more ‘sporting’, but instead it means replay value drops even further. Unless you’re some obsessive compulsive who likes mapping out badguys and racking up every combo/kill/achievement possible in a game, in which case The Club might just be your next obsession.



The final nail in The Club’s coffin is the fact that it’s possibly the most lazy console port we’ve seen since Kane & Lynch. If you like playing PC games with your Xbox controller, this is great news, but for the rest of us it’s a galling reminder of why our favourite platform is losing out to consoles. Whomever oversaw the port didn’t even bother removing the ‘Press Start’ instruction. There’s not even any ‘quit’ option; you’ve got to Alt F4 to get out. Fail.

There’s multiplayer, as well, but good luck finding a game.

The game at least looks good, and runs at a higher resolution than its console cousins. The problem with making the game speed-based, however, is that you can barely notice the settings, or the rag-dolling, or any other nice effects. It’s all kind of wasted as you’re forced to sprint through each level.