Reviews// The Club

So, it's kill or be killed - which would make a very interesting predicament in real life, full of ‘nail-biting drama’ and ‘roller-coaster ride-style adrenaline thrills’ as you avoided certain death by stabbing a man in the eye with a nail file, and throwing another into a conveniently placed threshing machine.

In a film, if the director is good - and this particular genre seems to attract the very worst - disbelief is kept at bay, and similar adrenal thrills abound. In a game, however, whenever you get killed, you just (and I'll rely once again on the gravelly croonsmanship of Mr Sinatra) pick yourself, dust yourself down, and start all over again.

In fact, The Club’s pretext is singularly ineffective at deflecting criticism of the game on the grounds of needless ultra-violence. Instead of simply being violent, the game posits that a shady bunch of megalomaniac sociopaths are abducting people to make them play a grim game of death. Let's hope Jack Thompson is busy elsewhere, or he'll surely have all sorts of stuff to say about this game and how it casually inures youth to callous murderous rampages, and even glorifies the behaviour with score multipliers.

The idea of the game, you see, is to score as many points as possible in each level. Indeed, you need to score a given number of points in order to successfully complete the level. Each level has a range of target scores, and you select the one you are going for before you commence the mayhem and slaughter.

On a typical level, simply wandering round aimlessly, like some kind of Emo kid with a gun you found under your girlfriend's dad's pillow simply won't cut the mustard. To reach even the lowest acceptable score, you'll need to chain a few kills to multiply your scores.

Chaining kills is all about speed - after each kill you have a fixed amount of time to find and dispatch your next baddie. Extend beyond this time and your bonus multiplier will begin to decrement. So, by the time you see the still warm, dead body slumping towards the ground, you need to be on your toes and sprinting towards your next quarry.

Moving between targets (as I callously think of the living, breathing, human characters we callously mow down during this callous game) takes a loosely fixed amount of time because your character can only run at one (infuriatingly slow) speed. So, once you sight your prey, speed of aiming is of paramount importance.

Clearly, learning the level is also vital. If you stumble around aimlessly you'll waste valuable seconds, and lose vital points. Therefore it may take a few goes at each level for you to learn the optimal route - the one that results in most blood on the ground.

The result of this style of game is that it plays much like the movie Shoot 'Em Up - see the irony there? Now there's a movie that deserved a video game tie-in. It also deserved to storm to the top of the charts and remain there for many, many weeks, but hey!