The Club

Singleplayer

In a singleplayer game, progress is very similar to how it is in a racer or beat-em-up. Again, The Club disposes of the usual shooter level setup and players won’t find themselves making their way slowly towards a boss creature – it’s much more organised.

Progress is divided into tournaments, each of which consists of a number of different rounds of various different types of events. Player performance is rated at the end of each event and depending on how you score on the leaderboard you’ll be awarded points. Bag first place and grab ten points, but come last and go home without anything to show for it – at the end of each tournament the points are added up and the top players win.

It’s simple and straight forward. There’s no long cutscenes in between levels or anything like that, just quick video introductions to each type of event and location which are completely skippable if you want.

Each event in a tournament takes place in the same core location, just with a different set of barricades and locked doors to funnel players through a different route. It can be a bit taxing to get used to these different courses through a level at first, but the game does the best it can to help out by adding in signs and arrows to tell you where to go.


There’s a whole load of different events in the game; Time Attack, Sprint and Siege to name a few. In reality though, they can only be narrowed down to two real types – those where you go fast and those where you don’t go anywhere.

In games like Sprint and Time Attack the aim is get through the level as quickly and accurately as you can. Time Attack shifts the focus slightly more towards speed as players have only a set amount of time to find the exit, while Sprint is more about scoring as many points as you can on your way there – but fundamentally they are the same. Both are about ploughing through enemies, taking down who you can and running past the others in an attempt to either find the exit or keep your combo going.

Counterpoint to this is Siege, which has players confined to a very small area that they cannot leave. The objective here is to stay alive until the time runs out – but you get scored on how many points you get, not on your survival. Siege brings a nice little contrast to the game as it’s often easy to hide in a corner and stay alive, but playing it safe won’t push your combo high enough to win.

It’s hard to know how to feel about the set-up of levels in The Club. On the one hand it makes perfect sense in the game and allows players to learn levels as they play, making the process both helpful and sensible, but at the same time it can get a little dull. You are essentially limited to playing small variations of the same level over and over again until you win, at which point the process repeats with a new décor.


Gunplay is another singleplayer mode of note and is a challenge creation tool where players can create their own tournaments by mixing levels, modes, weapons and objectives from throughout the game in order to test their mettle.

In tournament mode, a new reward is unlocked after each successful event – usually a new weapon or, if you do especially well, a new level. By piecing these unlocked fragments together players can quickly create challenges for their friends or arenas to show off their skills. They also make excellent practice areas if you’re having trouble with a specific level in a tournament and want to run a similar course without the pressure.

There are several unusual but cool combinations that can be made – Sprint events through the Ocean Liner armed only with a pistol, Siege events in the Prison using just the rocket launcher or, my personal favourite, Time Attacks in the Steel Mill using automatic shotguns.

There are some problems with the Gunplay mode and the interface for setting up new challenges is a tad on the unwieldy side – but then this mode is there mainly for those who’ve already seen the bulk of what The Club has to offer and, from that perspective, Gunplay is an excellent addition to the game.