The Club Review

There's relatively standard choice of weapons to toy around with, ranging from mini-guns and grenades, to pistols, rifles, SMGs and so on.

Experienced gamers, particularly those who are good at playing third-person shooters, won't find a lot to engage them here. At best, they can expect to get some fun out of gunning down a near-infinite amount of foes until they've achieved a satisfying result in the tournament. Fair enough, the multiplayer mode is entertaining, though only temporarily. The really bewildering part is that Bizarre decided to exclude combo system from most of the multiplayer modes. It was a weird decision. The combo system sort of stands as the core of the whole gameplay mechanics of The Club. You can play the 4-player split screen both offline and online... Shame you won't find many people playing online.

I can't say that The Club isn't fun, but it never excels at any point in the single-player (or the multiplayer). All the while I felt that this could've really been a decent action game, if the developers took the time to create a reasonably interesting universe around it and more features.

You'll get a few entertaining hours out of it, if you're determined to achieve a high score and try out all the game modes. There's a morsel of replayability, only in the sense of trying out other modes and re-entering tournaments with different characters, all of which have their own characteristics. This, unfortunately, feels like another underdeveloped aspect of the game, since all of the characters more or less behave the same way. The only real differences are speed, stamina and strength and that doesn't count for much during gameplay.

In short, The Club may fill the gap if you're waiting for "more serious" titles to hit the market. Although it's always nice to see developers facing challenges and taking their talents across new ground, in Bizarre's case, it's safe to say they're far better off making racers. Nice try, guys, but it appears you're not quite there yet.