The Club Game Review–Too Much Of The Same Old Thing
It’s good to see that Sega is still taking things too far for their own good, and a perfect example of this is its recent title The Club, a game that shows you you can never be too rich or too homicidal.
Basically, The Club is a lot like Twisted Metal, only without useless things like cars or clever backstories. The Club is an illegal underground deathmatch in which thugs and scoundrels from all walks of life are given access to large weapons and set loose inside abandoned settings filled with random people with guns, where they will be told to run around like lunatics and increase each other’s body weight by systematically injecting as much lead as possible into each other’s skin, to be repeated until the subjects are dead. Just kidding–they’ll be told to shoot each other. A lot.
That’s it. That’s the entire game. You run through about eight different maps with one of eight different avatars and you blast things. Oh, sure, you’ll do your blasting in different WAYS sometimes–some levels won’t allow you to move past a set area marked with traffic cones and chalk outlines lest the “micro-explosives” you’ve been implanted with detonate. Sometimes you’ll be running laps of a circuit, trying to string together sufficient kills to keep your It’s all about two important things, you see–moving fast and shooting stuff.
And when I say it’s ALL about two important things, moving fast and shooting stuff, the sad part is that I mean this literally. It’s ALL about moving fast and shooting stuff. Now, for me, this isn’t so much a problem in games like Twisted Metal where, as you advance through the levels, you get to learn more about a character, but in The Club, all you DO is run fast and shoot stuff. You don’t learn any more about your characters–none of them are really all that interesting with the possible exception of Nemo, a character who’s been in The Club so long that he’s lost his mind and is only left with an overpowering urge to kill. Everyone else is a refugee from action movies that we’ve all seen dozens of times before—the Russian juggernaut, the cocky American gambler, the Australian biker, the Canadian, um…extreme sports junkie? Okay, maybe we haven’t seen them ALL before but the basic archetypes aren’t that far off.
Graphics and gameplay are solid enough—it didn’t take long to get used to the game’s intense, high-speed play style and within about five minutes or so I was running around an abandoned steel mill in Germany committing murder on an epic scale. The game plays just fine—the biggest question is why would you ever want to?
The saddest part is, this game really could’ve been something if they’d taken a couple pages out of Twisted Metal: Black’s playbook, and given me some really interesting characters with full motion video storylines. What do these men (and they’re all men for some reason–it’s an old-boy’s Club, I suppose) want? I’ve got SOME idea, but frankly, not enough.
This isn’t to say The Club is a complete waste of your time. I can see it being a very interesting party game, where you get a couple buddies over and start running around trying to blast each other. And as adrenaline rushes go you could do vastly worse. Indeed, if all you’re looking for is a time waster for a couple days, The Club doesn’t do half badly. But sadly, if you’re looking for anything more than a quick rental, The Club’s membership won’t be worth its dues.