The Club seeks to bring something new to the shooter genre by adding some of the racing and style game mechanics Bizarre has become famous for in the Project Gotham Racing series. The game isn't just about taking down as many targets as possible; it's just as important to do it quickly and with flair. Points are given for each kill with more awarded based on where you shoot the enemy, how far away you are from the victim, and how difficult of a take down it is. If that's not enough to think about, there's also a combo multiplier that goes up with each kill but continuously ticks down in between. Each stage lasts no more than a few minutes as you race through a closed course to gun down as many enemies as you can, staying true to the arcade feeling of the game.
If you're not the type of gamer who obsesses over high scores, there really is no reason for you to pick up The Club. The main single player game, called the tournament, can be completed in under three hours and after that there's nothing to do except to replay the stages again and again. Of course, that's the point and you'll have to do it if you want to perfect your game and get the high score, but I can't help but find the game a bit shallow -- a one trick pony. After beating the game and going back to replay some stages, I didn't feel hooked by the game at all.
The Club claims to have five different types of events, but they essentially boil down to just two. Whether you're tasked with reaching an exit, reaching an exit under a certain time, or running several laps around a loop while killing to get extra time, the gameplay is identical. You won't do well in any of them if you don't move quickly to keep your combo up, so who cares if there's also a game clock? The other two events, siege and survivor, are so similar I thought they were the same thing until I was most of the way through the game.
So the game is really all about killing a lot of targets as fast as you can, regardless of the different ways Bizarre wants to present it. The enemies appear in the same places each time through one of the stages, as do the bonus targets hanging on walls that can be used to extend your combo meter, so it's possible to memorize each course and plan out a perfect route for maximum points. In this way, an obsessive person can find hours and hours of gameplay. Learning when to sprint and when to pause to shoot is the first step, but you can take it further. Since some enemy targets are worth more points than others and they often appear in clusters, the order you shoot them can affect your final score. Then if you want to get truly obsessive, you can go back through the levels and search for hidden targets planted in odd places in each stage.
