The Club

I finally got around to playing the actual game here after starting it last year to get the online achievements out of the way. The result was a resounding meh and here’s why.

The Club is a third person shooter where you can play as up to eight different characters in some weird tournament things which essentially boil down to you running and gunning your way through eight different environments, each one a different shade of brown and grey. A tournament consists of 6 or 7 events where you either have to:

Murder a bunch of dudes and get to an exit.
Murder a bunch of dudes while doing laps round a circuit.
Murder a bunch of dudes and get to an exit within a time limit.
Murder a bunch of dudes until a timer runs out.

So there isn’t a lot to do. Once you complete a tournament, you can play all the events in Single Event mode but this doesn’t add anything, it just allows you to replay the levels you’ve already done.

On top of the lack of gameplay, the gameplay itself is insanely frustrating if you are used to fast paced shooters. Aiming with a gun is painfully slow even if you muck around with the cursor speed in the settings, and because of the severely limited texture and colours, the enemies, who are also brown and grey, blend in to the background which means most levels become a memory game of remembering where dudes appear.

Running and movement is also a massive ballache. I’m not sure where all these characters have come from but they have the turning circle of an articulated lorry and get snagged on pretty much everything in the environment.

With that said, it does do something I like and that’s consider a headshot a lethal thing. Enemies will die if you shoot them in them in face. This may sound novel but most games just crank up the enemy survivability to make the game harder. This one rewards you for accuracy regardless of difficulty. Take a bow.

I don’t quite understand the back story or the announcer with the gravel voice but I don’t think this is an important part of the game. Other than that, the sound is meh too, but doesn’t become overbearing so it avoids being the worst part of the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There are a few categories to break down the achievements into, the biggest one of these being the miscellaneous bullshit you have to do that involves playing in stupid, counterproductive ways. Some of my personal favourites involve having to melee 30 guys in one level – oh, this is another part of the game that’s total shite. To punch enemies, you have to be in the exact right position to hit them. There’s no, ‘oh, you’re really close and facing the enemy and pressed the melee button so therefore you want to hit the enemy and not die.’ You will just punch air, slowly, three or four times before connecting with a hit.

Another one requires you to score the maximum multiplier in a level. This involves killing all enemies and shooting all skullshots in one free flowing combo while not getting shot yourself. Essentially you have to already know where everything is to pull this off. The easiest level for this is the last one on Venice because it only has 10 bad guys.

The other one I’ll mention is for getting all the different kill bonuses in one level. This is a pain as a lot of them are situational. It also requires 5 headshots in a row. Needless to say, this also took a lot of replaying.

The next category is collectibles. I’ve mentioned skullshots and there are a set amount of these in each of the single events. There are also some hidden skullshots in some levels and achievements are tied to shooting all of them. The problem is, there isn’t any real in-game tracking for this so it’s best to do it in one go, one level at a time. Once you get all skullshots in a tournament set, a concept art piece will unlock so there is some tracking but it’s minimal and because of the way I did it, I have no idea if this relates to regular skullshots, hidden skullshots or both.

The last category of single player achievements is for completing all of the tournaments on Insane difficulty. With a couple of guides saying where to stand and fight in the siege and survival levels, this wasn’t so bad with the exception of the first level of the last tournament, which a total pain in the ass. It took me about 15 attempts to get through it and once again it’s another one of those practice makes perfect situations, but this was the only real challenge of the Insane playthrough.

Multiplayer

Again, it’s another one of those games that’s so old now that the multiplayer is totally dead. Thankfully big groups aren’t required for any of the achievements and all of it can done with just two players. Nothing is challenging either and doesn’t require too much faffing about… with one exception.

Apparently Gears of War’s Seriously… achievement didn’t have enough kills on it and The Club had to go one better with their No, Seriously achievement for getting 10,001 kills in multiplayer. There are two problems with this. The first one is that a game such as The Club, which has virtually no critical acclaim, has absolutely no right to poke fun at Gears of War which such an obnoxious achievement. Secondly, earning this achievement takes more time than the rest of the game combined which is just stupid. And the multiplayer is total garbage so no one in their right mind would legitimately play long enough to rack up that many kills.

The Club is a very shallow gaming experience. It’s massively lacking on single player content, has horrible textures and looks lifeless. It’s not aged well and can’t be recommended. If you like your achievements, the No, Seriously achievement is a put off too.