The Club (PS3)

The first rule of The Club is, you do not play The Club. The second rule is ... well, you get the idea.
3/14/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

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.