The Club

Multiplayer

Naturally, no modern shooter would be complete without a multiplayer counterpart and with a game like The Club, multiplayer is a perfect fit. In fact, there are more multiplayer modes than there are singleplayer!

First off there’s the tried and tested deathmatch modes – two of them. The first, called Kill Match, is a by-the-number kill spree where the player with the most kills wins. The slight twist on this is Score Match, where it isn’t the most kills that wins, but the most points. True, often these go hand in hand, but sometimes the multipliers can shift the balance.

Team Kill Match is exactly what it says on the tin – a team based race to the most kills which fully rounds out the standard multiplayer modes along with the CTF-alike, Team Capture.

Where things get interesting is with the remaining three modes, the first of which is Hunter Killer.

In Hunter Killer one player is designated as the Hunted and that player’s score is constantly climbing. Nobody else can score except the Hunted and whoever kills that player will become the Hunted themselves, forcing players to compete. Of course, Hunters can kill each other too to slow each other down and a tracker is constantly alerting them where the Hunted (who doesn’t have a radar) is so that players are forced into contact.


Team Skull Shot is the penultimate mode in The Club and is a revision of CTF-like rules. Each team has five Skull Shots (warning signs with skulls emblazoned on them) and the aim is to wipe out the other team’s signs while preserving your own. It couldn’t be any simpler but, unfortunately, that also made the mode quite dull in our opinion.

Thankfully then, the best is saved for last – Team Siege is a fantastic multiplayer take on the singleplayer mode where players must hold off a siege of enemies for a set period of time. In the multiplayer mode, each team is put on a side—either offending or defending—and the rest speaks for itself. It’s easily the most interesting of all the game modes because defending players are limited to only one respawn and a small area of the map that they cannot leave.

Team Siege is by far the most fun of all the multiplayer modes, but in reality none of them are all that bad and even Team Skull Shot, which is definitely the weakest in the bunch to our eyes, has merits thanks to the finely honed and perfectly balanced weapons and controls. No single player is ever left feeling weaker than the others and the whole array of multiplayer modes play out gloriously.

Conclusions

Don’t be fooled by the guns and the explosion – it’s been made clear to us over the course of this review that The Club isn’t actually a third person shooter at all. Really, it’s a very cleverly disguised beat-em-up; Tekken with all the regular moves left out and just the special combos remaining.

The whole game feels like Soul Calibur in the twenty-first century and the proof is in the short character biographies, the combo-centric gameplay and the booming voice that yells “Finn! Fight!” at the start of every round.

Unfortunately, like most beat-em-ups, The Club is also a love-it-or-hate-it affair and it doesn’t surprise me to hear that the developers refer to it as ‘The Marmite Game’. The experience players have with The Club depends more on the gamers themselves than the game and, just as some people love Virtua Fighter but hate Dead or Alive, so too will players of The Club become divided.

Personally, I can see the game isn’t for me – the forced practice and repetition of levels in order to get high scores and an unequalled level of perfection just doesn’t interest me. I can still see the appeal and craftsmanship in the game though and the level of polish on some of the levels is truly extraordinary.

If practice makes perfect is your motto and you love honing your skills to a razor edge then The Club could be the best investment you make all year. If you’re the type of gamer to learn all the cool combos in Soul Calibur or you can manual forever in the latest Tony Hawk’s then this is the game for you – it’s complex, but approachable and a great proving ground for your skills and memory. On the other hand, if you prefer games that you only need play once or with stories that occupy more than the head of a matchstick, then you may want to give The Club a miss. It’s not a bad game by any measure – but it isn’t for everyone.