The Club Review (PS3)

Welcome to the Club

Fast-paced and full to the brim with adrenaline, The Club was an early PS3 release from SEGA, and an attempt at a series too. A sequel was talked about for a while but due to the developing team departing from SEGA, it disintegrated. What’s left with us is a mega-promising third person shooter title like no other.

The Club isn’t a third person shooter, not by normal means anyway. The Club feels like an arcade racing game, forcing you to sprint through levels, taking out everyone and everything in your way to achieve the highest score possible. This game focuses a lot on points and it’s very generous with giving you ways to earn them.

The premise of The Club is about a secret tournament. Contestants are plucked from their homelands and hideouts and forced to compete in a brutal gun race, with the winner earning his freedom and the others being decimated. This is an interesting idea, not too dissimilar from movies like The Condemned or The Hunger Games franchise.

The game does well at having a reasonably sized roster for you to choose from, with the characters playing differently as well as being completely aesthetically diverse from one another. The characters are all rated on speed, strength and stamina so that you can choose to sprint through the mission, pummel your opponents out of your way or endure almost anything your foes throw at you.

The Club features a variety of exciting and innovative game modes, including time attack. Time attack modes were previously a main stay in multiple video game genres, and the game uses all its power to try and bring back the old-school shooter gameplay mechanic of yesterday. There is also a survivor mode where you have to hold out as long as you can whilst enemies attack you from above, below and everywhere in-between.

The game isn’t scarce with ways for you to score points either. You can get points for kills, headshots, ricocheting bullets, killing an enemy with your last bullet, shooting collectibles and many more. The seven competitors you are pitched against all have a score too, so you’ll have to get as many points as possible to earn first place on the leaderboard.

The Club shines in its multiplayer. You can have local split-screen battles against your friends, which can be terrifying if you are facing the massive Russian Dragov as he can sneak up on you and take you out in just one punch. He’s one of the few characters strong enough to withstand a point blank rocket launcher shot. There are quite a few maps too, but as the game doesn’t feature any AI bots, only one of the maps seems to be the right size for a 1v1.

Overall, I feel if the game had AI bots for the multiplayer modes it would’ve been a lot more successful and maybe could’ve ended up with a sequel. However, we are now eight years on from it’s original release and all talk is officially dead. As much as I wish there was more to this game, the few hours of fun, that each dose grants you, seem to be enough.