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Combat driving games barely raise an eyebrow these days. Bolting the artillery of a third-person-shooter onto a sports car is old news in a gaming landscape filled with ‘genre-defying’ titles.
Reversing the concept of heavily armed racing would be something new though, which is exactly what Sega and Bizarre Creations are attempting with The Club. It sounds an unusual idea at first, but taking the principles of speed and cornering and applying them to a traditional shooting game really does seem to have worked for The Club. Sega proudly demonstrated pre-alpha code for the game at their London HQ, and though they kept the controllers firmly in their hands, it was a pleasure to see one of their biggest projects of the year in action.
The Club itself refers to an illegal organisation run by various thrill-seeking high-flyers, including mob bosses, politicians and rock stars. Using their power and influence, they host underground blood-sport events that are in essence modern gladiatorial battles with guns. The elite organisers of The Club recruit the desperate and the psychotic to fight in their deserted urban arenas, with promises of big prize money for the survivors of every skirmish.
Assuming the role of one of eight of the most successful of the combatants, you must enter various battles and contests, in a game that has equal emphasis on single and multiplayer games. So far so ordinary, but there is something more to this third-person frag fest.
Although killing everyone you can is important, The Club is about scoring points. Many of these points are gathered from executions, with larger scores for headshots, long ranged kills and other feats of skill and agility, including speed, which is the real core of The Club. Big points come from the combos, where you shoot multiple enemies in close succession, and from finishing the level quickly. Each of the eight huge environments of the game has several areas, each with a start and finish line, and multiple routes between the two. The emphasis in the main game modes is on tearing through these levels at breakneck speed, picking off enemies and keeping on the move.
Although there is some variation in the position of your enemies as you approach them, you can learn their formations. Furthermore, there is no room for stealth or finding cover, which is exactly where the racing elements come in. While charging through each level it is best to think of enemies as corners. To achieve a high scoring run you must waste no time, meaning you must pick off your foes on the go with blinding pace and accuracy, with minimum time spent standing still or dawdling. It certainly looks like The Club will encourage Tony Hawk style ‘restart-gaming’, where you repeatedly return to the beginning of the level in search of the perfect high-combo run, adding a great deal of potential longevity to the title. Various game modes will encourage less race-orientated melees, but all of the battles demonstrated in the Steel Mill level resulted in brief and hectic runs of little more than three minutes.
The Club also takes a fair amount of inspiration from the fighting genre, offering multiple player characters as opposed to a sole protagonist, and focusing on a concept-lead plot rather than following a personal journey and storyline. Additionally, there is also something of the hardcore shmup to The Club. With dizzying speed you must keep on the move, learning formations and enemy attack patterns while you pick them off and rack up chains of kills, simultaneously hunting down bonuses and triggering explosions.
With all these influences, the game certainly appears to be a refreshing take on the mechanics of the third-person shooter, but there is also something distinctively GoldenEye about the whole thing, which means one thing: multiplayer.
Online will certainly be a major part of the multiplayer elements, allowing for 16-player matches, but the four-player split-screen looks like it will become a very popular part of the game. The days of the post-pub split-screen gaming marathon have almost been left behind by the newly accessible world of online console gaming, but The Club is out to reinstate playing late into the night with friends grinning and giggling.
Of course, without any hands-on time it is difficult to make bold statements about the value of the gameplay, but even from such early preview code it is clear to see that Bizarre Creations’ trademark obsession with technical quality is present here. Despite the odd glitch that will undoubtedly be ironed out as production wraps up, the game was very easy on the eye. The hand-painted level surfaces by Gears of War concept artist John Wallin are filled with detail, and the sound of gunshots and ricochets had an incredible depth.
We can only hope that The Club is as good as it sounds. The faint whiff of old school shooting that it leaves in its wake will absolutely make for an invigorating alternative to the current trend for set-piece, stealth and tactical shooters, and the idea of the high speed gun battle is one that should be immensely popular. If the apparent slick production values, addictive gameplay and immense replay value are a reality, then the sooner The Club opens its doors the better.
