The Club, Out This Week

The much-hyped shooter by racing game masters Bizarre Creations is out on Friday. It's a gun game with a difference: the action is a little closer to fighting games or racing games than your traditional kill 'em up. The Club is where the hi-score table is what matters, and your ability to get flick headshots dominates everything else. It's a little closer to the arcade cabinet rail shooter than your traditional third-person shooter, and it throws a bunch of different characters and challenges at you, like a fighting game, rather than any kind of story or campaign. These short gunfight are about getting a continuous stream of headshots, flick-shots, and combat-roll-to-headshots to pump up your score multiplier. The more consistently you kill, the higher you'll rank on the score tables of The Club.

Past the jump: a developer video and the RPS opinion on The Club.

We'd like to join YOUR club, Gametrailers!

We've had a bit of a play with the game on PC and 360 and we're a little disappointed. It's one of those games that becomes a memory test: play through a couple of times and remember where all the bads come from and you'll ace it. The dudes that you pump bullets into might as well be wooden pop ups, they're just so characterless and bland. Whether you "get" The Club is probably going to depend on whether you get a buzz out of precision shooting, and like the challenge of scrambling your way to the top of a scoreboard in an event where your nearest rival *always* comes top of his event. The Club is a fun idea, but it just feels a little too hollow to be worth bothering with. If the game had offered a little more breadth in the ways and means you have fight, move, and use scenery, it might have been interesting. Instead, just play Stranglehold. We really haven't come very far from Operation Wolf with this one.