With such a large selection of shooters on the market today, game companies are striving to come up with innovative new ways to explore the popular genre in order to keep it fresh and interesting for consumers. Sometimes these innovations revolutionize the genre in ways beneficial to the gaming community as a whole, but more often than not video games do just enough to prove passable while rarely managing to break the mold and truly stand out. Interestingly, The Club falls somewhere in the middle by mixing an intensely competitive focus of high score pursuit with gameplay that is common and unoriginal, perhaps even deliberately so.

Within the storyline, The Club itself is a violent society where players are initiated through organized combat in specially designated arenas. Thin and full of plot holes, this story serves merely as a vessel for the gameplay and carries little value of its own. Players can select from six different characters by default, all of which have a unique look and minimal backstory, but none of which have been fleshed out for the player with a true sense of personality.

Scores and multipliers play a huge role in The Club.

In simple terms, The Club is a third-person shooter through which a player accumulates kills by way of fast and simple gun combat in order to rack up high scores and progress through a small selection of levels. Though players must survive enemy gunfire and often deal with time limits and exit points, the true challenge and appeal of The Club comes from the pursuit of top scores. While many games maintain online leaderboards, the idea of reaching the highest plateau is integrated into the game's presentation and scoring system. Enemies must be dispatched quickly and in succession in order to build up scoring combos. Headshots, long-distant kills, multiple enemy kills and ricochet kills are all awarded with additional bonuses. A simple and tight control scheme makes blasting through levels fun and easy with a learning curve that will prove comfortable for anyone familiar with the genre. This simplicity makes for a great pick up and play experience, but it also hurts the long term appeal of the gameplay itself.

The heart of The Club comes by way of the tournament mode which acts as the single player campaign. There are a total of eight tournaments, and each must be played sequentially at first, with the completion of each tournament unlocking the next. Every tournament takes place at a specific location from an ocean liner, to an old abandoned prison, to a deadly, crumbling war-zone. Each location houses six to seven events, with every event presenting slightly differing circumstances and goals. The most utilized event known as "Sprint" simply involves running from one side of the level to the other while killing as many enemies as possible for point accumulation. "Gauntlet" plays in an identical fashion, but players must reach the exit point within a designated time limit. "Survival" and "Siege" each involve being trapped within a limited section of the level as enemies continue to spawn and attack until a time limit expires. Unfortunately, the variety and level design are not strong enough to keep these events interesting for long as they all rely on the same basic mechanics and rarely deviate from tournament to tournament.

During the course of tournament mode, players rely on a standard variety of guns as well as a small selection of other combat options in order to take out enemies. Pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles, submachine guns, and rocket launchers all make appearances and all work as expected. Grenades can be thrown with the B button, and the left bumper executes a poorly implemented and imprecise melee attack. These attacks are directed at AI opponents whose notable simplicity is only excused by the nature of the game. Each enemy is scripted to execute a precise and simple pattern that repeats every time you play through an event. Some enemies permanently plant themselves behind cover while others will simply run straight at you. Memorizing these patterns and paying attention to little details becomes a key strategy that is rewarded with better scores and more efficient level completion. This dynamic, however, will only appeal to gamers who are comfortable repeating the same levels over and over again. Ultimately, The Club features tight gunplay and a complex system of scorekeeping, but does so at the cost of player choice, variety, and innovation.

While shallow gameplay can be masked by scripted events and scorekeeping during the single player tournaments, multiplayer offers The Club no such luxury. Attempting to do what so many other shooters have successfully done over the years, the game allows players to choose between a handful of standard modes that allow players to battle through split screen or Xbox Live, but feels merely tacked on and offers nothing that other similar titles don't do better. While players are free to run around the available levels shooting and blowing each other up, the controls and level layout simply are not optimized for head-to-head competition. This effectively renders the multiplayer component the weakest part of the game.

The visual presentation is often bland and uninteresting.

The indistinct nature of the presentation bleeds into The Club's graphical appearance. Environments are bland and maze-like with limited color palettes of grays and browns in all but a few areas. The enemies inhabiting these locales lack in detail and take on a bizarre hodgepodge of forms, ranging in appearance from gang member, to secret agent, to riot police. Diverse as it sounds, there are still relatively few enemy types and often two identical models will appear simultaneously. While notable graphical flaws are not apparent, The Club never impresses with its technical or artistic sensibilities. Essentially, the visuals manage to be adequate enough to serve the game while never allowing it to stand out from the crowd.

While the graphical portion of The Club is standard and generic, the audio portion fares much better. Gunfire has a satisfying pop and distinctly varies from weapon to weapon. Both the menu and in-game music have a gritty industrial rock sound that admirably fits in and helps to set up the games pacing and atmosphere. The ambience is further established by the deep, ominously voiced announcer who calls out character names and provides light commentary during battle events. As a whole, the sound may be The Club's largest technical strength.

At its core, The Club is all about shooting, running, and then shooting some more. This broad approach to game development is risky considering the saturation of similar titles on the market, but the gameplay is well supplemented by a scoring system that adds value to repeated play and practice. Even so, the game is bare on presentation and gameplay innovation, instead drawing crowds through the simplicity of the combat while relying on a competitive scoring structure to keep players sticking around. The Club fills a definite niche, and is a good fit for those interested in the competitive pursuit of high scores, but the core mechanics alone don't carry it even as far as the brief campaign lasts.