The Club Review
This is a review I started a couple of months ago but only now have gotten round to finishing it off! The Club….read on for my take!
A dash of third-person perspective, a healthy dose of non-stop action, a sprinkle of arcade scoring with a dollop of random bad guys on top. Something is wrong though, this would be the basis of a very good shooter, but to become a great shooter it will require that special ingredient that elusive to all but the very best of games.
That is the problem with The Club, it is a solid shooter which allows you to leave your brain sitting by the keyboard while you run around a variety of maps shooting up a whole load of bad guys. It does it well, there are no glaring problems with the game. It just lacks that special ingredient required to make it a must-buy game. I think that the inclusion of Games for Windows Live knocks it down below the ‘oh I have a spare wad of cash, lets go and buy just one full price game!’
You see, The Club would fit in perfectly in the middle price range for PC games what with it offering everything bar that one special ingredient needed to make it a top-notch game.
So let us address what The Club is missing, that certain special ingredient I have harped on about so much already I have written myself into something of a corner. For The Club it is a few things that make up the special ingredient that it is missing.
A certain, unmistakable lack of character is a large part of why The Club falls short of what it so could have achieved. There may be a nice selection of characters to choose from while you play but they could all be the same for the amount of personality they have. They may all look different, have strange twisted names and have different physical attributes but that doesn’t stop them all just
fading into the background of high-scores and combos.
You see The Club expends so much energy in throwing in a somewhat fresh take on the shooter genre that you focus more on your score in the top right corner of your screen than on worrying about your chosen avatar’s health in a fight or on whether he will survive the challenges the ‘Club’ throws at him.
This though is why you play The Club, to get a big score by stringing together kills of the numerous enemies populating the various levels. Kill them with headshots, kill them following a fancy bit of footwork or multi-kill them to get the big scores. Better yet get a big combo of kills and you will get big points.
This is enough to get you to play for a while, and the gameplay itself is satisfactory and at times it is highly rewarding to blow apart a group of five or so enemies to hear the words ‘multi-kill’ be stated. Note that things like multi-kill or ‘rico-kill’ (what the hell is a rico-kill?), are stated, not shouted and praised to the almighty like they are in a game like Unreal Tournament.
I digress, the gameplay revolves around your character fighting his way through a variety of levels, each with different techniques required to complete. These range from getting from the start to the end of the level purely with the highest score, other game modes force you to hold your ground in a limited area for a fixed amount of time, or to complete laps around a predefined course before the time runs down.
These varying levels and game modes are contained within several different areas that the fictional ‘Club’ takes you through in the tournament mode. While the different areas are all distinctive with the stately British mansion and the Prison sticking to mind they all feel samey. The scenery changes between the different areas, but you are doing the same things all the time in them. It just feels like the developers created the different areas but lacked the time to define and differ what you are doing in each place.
Again we come back to the missing ingredient issue. The Club does what it does well, the different areas and levels are very solid, but there is little within them that stands out and says ‘I am a great game.’ The Club is a game that you will find yourself playing, completing the Tournament mode…and pretty much leave there and then.
There are other game modes apart from Tournament, you can chose a character and play any of the areas you unlocked in the Tournament as you wish, or you can go mix and match different levels from the different areas as you wish. But again you will simply be going back over the same old ground you have already played and done before. There is little to make you really want to go back and play the various levels again.
And now we come to the implementation of ‘Live’ into The Club. Games for Windows Live is the initiative set out by Microsoft to take elements of Xbox Live and throw them into PC ports of the 360 games.
The Club suffers heavily from the Live experience. While you can play multiplayer and keep track of your own achievements with the free Silver package, to get the match making service and to get your name added to the scoreboards you need to fork out the money for the Gold package.
With the goal of getting big scores being the main focus of The Club, forcing you to pay to see how you performed against other players is a rip-off. This is something which should be standard for a game like The Club, alas it isn’t, and again it is a case of that missing ingredient being what drags down and makes The Club a less than great game.
The game looks nice but again not great. In a world of Portal, Unreal Tournament and Crysis we see The Club just slip into the background. It looks fine, the weapons feel fine and the various characters look fine. There just isn’t anything that says ‘PLAY ME’ from the graphics of this game.
While graphics should not be the be all and end all of a game they have to be of a certain level and have a good feel to them to be considered good.
The issues surrounding The Club in gameplay, Live and graphics extend to the sounds. They just aren’t that good and there is nothing to make them stand out from the crowd. The sound isn’t bad, it just isn’t that good.
This is a game that has so much promise, it really does. Unfortunately it does nothing to make it a must have purchase. The Club is well worth picking up for a bargain or as part of a multi-buy deal, but I can’t recommend a full price purchase of this. It is just lacking that certain something to make it a top quality game. I am sure that some people will get it and love it, but in my mind those people will be minority.