Welcome to The Club, a secret organisation of corrupt businessmen and twisted millionaires who collectively fund and gamble upon the world's most lethal bloodsport. Accessed through shadowy middleman The Secretary, The Club sees modern day gun-toting gladiators battle for the amusement and fortune of others while fighting through seemingly insurmountable odds to rack up points, success and, ultimately, their survival.

Explanations of tenuous gameplay narrative conveniently sidestepped, The Club is perhaps best described as the bastard videogame child of a Hollywood menage a trois between the underground violence of Fight Club, the spectacle of The Running Man, and the murderous fetishism of Hostel.

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At its heart, The Club is a relatively straightforward first-person shooter, but while most offerings rely on the traditional structure of gradually more intensive missions spread throughout a story-led single-player campaign, The Club instead abandons real-world authenticity for a much more throwaway arcade style of gameplay.

The core of the game is Tournament, which offers up a selection of eight differently skilled Club members to choose from and interchange between - two are initially locked off and only become available later. Once ready to enter The Club, players are subsequently tasked by The Secretary with completing a variety of fairly simple objectives across eight locations while amassing points for opponents killed, kill combos, speed, shot accuracy, and more.

The varied locations include the likes of Stahlwerk, an industrial German steel mill, and Venezia, which showcases the beautiful but claustrophobic walkways of Venice. Then there's the leaning, rusting hulk of the Ocean Liner, the eerie confines of incarceration in Prison Cells, and the deadly splendour of Manor House, along with Warehouse, Bunkers, and Warzone.

Each of the eight locations is then divided into 6 or 7 levels (for a total of 49), which consist of Siege, Sprint, Time Attack, Survivor and Run the Gauntlet. While the missions differ insofar as some involve staying alive for a certain period of time, some challenge the player to reach the level exit before the timer runs down, and some require the successful completion of laps, the ultimate goal of each level is constant throughout - rack up as many kill points as possible.

This is accomplished by quite simply filling and maintaining an on-screen combo bar, which is activated by sprinting between kills and executing the swift dispatch of A.I. opponents in order to continue the kill combo for the longest possible time and prevent the bar from bleeding out to zero. Scattered throughout each level are combo icons (Skullshots) that need to be destroyed in order to keep the combo bar at maximum capacity while moving to engage more enemies and/or struggling to pick off those shooting from distance or behind cover. Similarly, there are handy explosive barrels to be found, which often make for easier targets and help take down opposition while on the move.

While there's no true plot to be found in The Club and it drives the player forward on the somewhat shallow appeal of its distinctly arcade gameplay, the good news is that, as a first-person experience, The Club is surprisingly addictive and a whole lot of fun - especially in an overpopulated genre that all-too often reeks of derivative profit sponging and an overwhelming lack of creativity. Moreover, The Club doesn't want players to invest time in forming emotional connections to NPCs, it doesn't want players to submerge themselves in contrived narrative, it doesn't want players to direct a squad of accompanying soldiers, and it doesn't want players to learn and adopt and tactics. No, it just wants them to charge headlong through levels and concentrate on nothing more than scoring maximum points in a short period of time in order to ensure their ongoing participation. It's a simple foundation to build upon, and it works well for the most part.

On the negative side, The Club's levels are strictly linear, occasionally repetitive, a little too brief, and, in the main, rather restrictive and lacking in ambition. That said, the frenetic immediacy of the run-and-gun gameplay goes some way to excusing the linearity, while the sheer unrelenting pace of the often means that reused level elements tend to go amiss during moments of intense gunplay and combo chaining. And, on the plus side, The Club's environments - while not jaw-dropping in their beauty - certainly carry a lot more visual oomph than a great many other FPS entries of recent times.

The Club offers players an expanding arsenal of 17 different weapons, ranging from fairly ineffectual pistols and machine pistols through to hard-hitting assault rifles, heavy machine guns, scoped sniper rifles and rocket launchers. Weapon pick-up is simple and unobtrusive to the gameplay, allowing players to pass over available guns for an instant retrieval, while a quick nudge of the directional pad allows for rotating weapon selection, and depleted equipment is immediately replaced by whatever else the player is carrying at that time to ensure uninterrupted bullet spraying.

Via strong performance in Tournament mode, The Club also allows players to unlock extra single-player opportunities in Single Event and Gunplay modes. The former enables players to select any character and take on any of the completed levels from Tournament, while the latter delivers a predetermined 'Playlist' of mission levels plucked from across Tournament and lays them out in a set of specific challenges made up of points target, weapon availability and difficulty. Gunplay also offers up the 'Build Playlist' feature, which enables players to combine unlocked mission levels for the added longevity of customised challenges. Factor in Achievements, separate in-game achievements and Live, split screen, and system link multiplayer, and The Club manages to carve itself quite a cosy niche as the kind of game players will be fond of dipping in and out of with alarming regularity.

Boasting the same kind of gamer-friendly appeal as fellow arcade-esque first-person shooter TimeSplitters, the application of an addictive points-based mission system in The Club certainly pushes players to keep moving at breakneck speeds, which leads to the promotion of unrelenting action, wicked reflexes, and a reason other than sadistic morbidity to shoot for distant headshots.

FPS purists that love to revel in the epic spectacle played out in titles such as BioShock, and might not find much to crow about with The Club. But, for those fans of the FPS genre sick of trudging through half-baked narrative and lacklustre execution (Clive Barker's Jericho, TimeShift to name but a few), SEGA and have partnered to produce a welcome breath of fresh air that holds its own in a genre bursting with clones.

It's not the prettiest FPS you'll ever play, and it's certainly not the best, but The Club isn't attempting to seduce its prospective audience with in-game gimmicks and "look at me" set pieces. Its strengths lie in that it's simple to a fault, it's direct and honest, it's damn addictive, and it's the perfect foil for starting (or ending) a fun Saturday night on the town - or any night for that matter. What more do you need from an arcade FPS game?

You can read our interview on The Club, now.

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By Stevie Smith

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