Picture yourself as a well-to-do type with Scrooge McDuck-style wealth and more power than most world leaders. What do you do with such immense and inscrutable status? Donate to charity? Solve social and economic problems? Rope a bunch of murderers and lowlifes into a series of modern-day gladiatorial events for your own personal amusement? Bingo.

Such is the premise of Sega and developer Bizarre Creations' The Club, an arcade-style action title that's got more in common with a shooting gallery than most modern shooters. Scads of gun-toting scumbags pop up out of every nook and cranny of various exotic and elaborate locales, and you aim, shoot, and make with the death. That's about it. Certainly more than the lion's share of the world's shooters have gotten by with roughly the same idea, but most of them have managed to do so with a great deal more flair and style than this relatively mundane effort provides. The Club isn't entirely without merit, as its multiplayer component has a scant few moments of proper amusement, but the vast bulk of the experience boils down to the equivalent of whack-a-mole with guns, which, as you might imagine, doesn't provide much staying power.

The Club offers you eight playable psychopaths, each one more culturally stereotypical than the next. Fortunately, none of them speak or really have any sort of differentiation between them apart from statistical data that rates them in categories of speed, stamina and strength. There's no real story to speak of in The Club, save for a bit of narration from The Club's Secretary (who sounds on par with the quality of voice acting you would get if you stopped any random American on the street, shoved a script into their hands, and demanded that they read the lines like a snooty British super-villain), and some brief, glib ending sequences for each character that are about as insightful as the text printed on the underside of your average bottle cap.

Then again, trying to read into the ethos of a game as patently oriented towards nonstop killing as The Club is probably a fool's errand. The point is to run around shooting dudes in the face, not to understand the background behind the situation -- though it'd be nice if that background made a lick of sense. The real problem with The Club is that the act of shooting dudes in the face doesn't provide anything near the thrill it should. It is a flat and downright boring experience repeated ad nauseum over the course of the game's eight single-player "tournaments."

The hook behind the game's action is that it's all score-based -- like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, but with the skateboards replaced with murder. You shoot a guy, and a combo meter kicks in. Shoot another guy, and your combo multiplier jumps up one. If you take a considerable amount of time between killings, the combo meter starts to bleed until you replenish it with more sweet, sweet death. Along the way, various skull plaques plastered on the walls can be shot to keep a combo going if no human bullet fodder happens to be nearby. You do this again, and again, and again, and again, with only rule set changes to throw any variety into the proceedings. Whether you're doing it with a timer, trying to survive while confined to a specific area of a stage, or just running through like a madman, the song remains the same: Shoot people and score points.

Depressingly, the scoring system itself is actually pretty addictive. The more you play, the more you start thinking about how you could have done each stage better. Just nail a few quicker kills and a couple more skull shots, and often your score will increase exponentially. You almost want to take the time to get good at it ... almost. The problem is, the shooting itself isn't nearly interesting enough to keep its hooks in you. There's a decent variety of weaponry, and a sufficient level of challenge (eventually, anyway -- it takes a while to warm up), but there is so little style, so little punch, so little technique to the gameplay that eventually you start to feel like you're playing some gun-crazy version of Dynasty Warriors -- and that's not a good thing.

For one thing, your chosen psycho, regardless of which one it is, is exceptionally limited in what he can do. He can shoot any of his acquired guns, toss various grenades, crouch, melee attack, and roll. That's it. No cool special moves, no Max Payne-esque slo-mo craziness, no pizzazz whatsoever. You don't even have proper cover mechanics beyond the basic crouch, despite the fact that enemies seem pretty good at wall hugging, blind firing and other crafty maneuvers. Fortunately, they're so hell-bent on killing you that they don't rely on those moves very heavily, and most often just stand around shooting at you until they run out of ammo, or run straight at you while shooting until they run out of ammo, at which point they start running away from you. Even as the challenge level ramps up, your interest will continue to dwindle bit by bit until you realize that you're actually playing the 3-D equivalent of Hogan's Alley and give up on it.

Most of the above criticisms tie specifically into the game's single-player modes. The multiplayer is a bit different and slightly better. There is still a definitive lack of style permeating the online modes, but at least the predictability is gone when you engage other players. There are also a greater variety of modes online, including multiple free-for-all and team-based modes. Some of these modes are a little on the middling side, but others, such as the Hunted mode (where you become ?it,? like in a game of tag, by killing an opponent and try to stay alive for as long as possible) and Team Fox Hunt (which assigns a ?fox? to each team who must be protected from enemy attacks) are actually inventive and relatively fun. Granted, none of these modes are much of a cut above the vast bulk of the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or PC's many, many competent shooters, but hey, competency is at least something.

Incidentally, if you're still hell-bent on buying The Club and need to know which version to get, you won't find many differences between them. They all look roughly the same, which is to say technically proficient, but aesthetically boilerplate. The PC version is slightly cheaper than its console counterparts and also has the added bonus of mouse and keyboard controls, which are a bit more precise. On the flipside, the PC version's online mode requires you to have a Live account to play it. If you've already got Live, then no worries, but if you don't have the service, you'll need to hook it up to play.

It's not difficult to envision some from the casual crowd picking up The Club and getting into it. If you're the type that enjoys turning off your brain altogether while playing games and you just want to shoot stuff without putting much effort into it, The Club serves that basic need in entirely adequate fashion, but so do a lot of other, far more interesting games, many of which can now be bought for considerably cheaper than the full retail price this baby's going for. It's not the game's old-school mentality that sinks it, but rather its inability to turn that mentality into anything other than an exercise in tedium.

This review was based on retail copies of the game provided by the publisher.