Previews// The Club

SPOnG managed to catch up with some of the guys from Liverpool's finest game development house, Bizarre Creations, recently to catch an all-too-brief glimpse of their forthcoming next generation project for Sega, a ground breaking new third person shooter (yes, there is such a thing!) called The Club.

Bizarre's Design Manager, Nick Davies, and The Club's Lead Designer, Matt Cavanagh, gave us a quick whip through the first level of the game, telling us a little more about what was in store. If you are either a Sega fanboy and/or a fan of Bizarre - the creators of the original Formula 1, Metropolis Street Racer, and Project Gotham series - then you are going to need to read on to find out what you need to know about The Club.

Following on from Project Gotham Racing Three and Xbox Live Arcade mega-hit Geometry Wars, the development mini-gods at Bizarre Creations are rightly being lauded as hot shit in the development community right now, having just picked up MCV's 'Development Team of the Year' award for 2006. It seems that anything this talented team of Scousers touch turns to gaming gold right now, so SPOnG was sufficiently 'pumped' to check out what they're planning on serving up on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2007 (the game's currently scheduled for a spring release next year).

So, what is The Club? The guys from Bizarre described it to us as being like 'Fight Club, but with guns'. "Errr, ok boys," SPOnG thought at first, "like, wtf are you on about?" But it soon became (a little) clearer. 'The Club' in question is an illegal, underground network made up of three groups of people. Firstly, funding this dodgy scene, we have the Moneymen. In the games industry 'the moneymen' are those high-falutin' marketing reps that work for the bigger publishers and who like to flash their golden expense account credit cards to their peers at any opportunity. There are similarities here with The Club, although the Moneymen in the game pay for, and gamble on, the other two in-game castes to hunt and murder each other. For sport.

The other two in-game groups are the Prey (you, the player) and the Hunters (the numerous scary fellas dotting the levels who are trying to kill you). So it's here where SPOnG begins to see the first, albeit vague similarities with Fight Club. It's also here where we can see 'outraged from Tunbridge Wells' calling to ban this game at some point next year. Of course, the reasonably common Sci Fi trope the 'pay-to-kill sport theme' has been done before, but as soon as content such as this pops up in a video game, it's sure to wind somebody up the wrong way.

Bizarre's Nick Davies tries to make things clearer: "What we've done with The Club is kind of like what we did with PGR, where we took a basic genre (in that case, of course, driving games) and added a new twist to it. So with this game we're taking an established genre - the third-person shooter - and adding a Bizarre Creation's slant on it... So it becomes something which we think is pretty fresh and new."

Vague sound bites aside, the first thought SPOnG had when we viewed the demo level of the game, was that The Club looks and plays a little bit like Time Crisis, but without the player being on a fixed, unmoveable course through the levels (i.e. you shoot and move, as Alan Partridge's Geordie mate at the Linton Travel Tavern would have it). That and also that it is f*cking fast, so the parallels being drawn with Project Gotham Racing suddenly seem to make more sense.

The player's viewpoint is over-the-shoulder, third-person and in order to get through the levels, whilst racking up higher scores (i.e. making more money) you will need to be able to remember where your opponents pop up from, where the health packs and weapons are situated and so on. Each time you replay a level, you'll (hopefully) be able to do it a little faster, taking out more enemies with a little bit more élan.