The Club - First Look Preview

The Club. Currently in development for SEGA at Liverpool-based Bizarre Creations, this Winter 2007 title for Xbox 360 and PlayStation3 has for the most part been kept behind closed doors. Elusive and secretive since it was first confirmed back in May 2006, the marketing strategy for the game to date isn't too far removed from the titular Club itself. But at a secret location (OK, it was at SEGA's European HQ), the first layers of The Club were peeled off, allowing TVG to get a look at what SEGA and Bizarre refer to as 'Gladiators with guns'.

A sinister, gladiatorial 'hobby' for the globe's super-elite of Presidents, royalty, and the über-rich, The Club is an organisation where vast swathes of money exchanges hands depending on the outcome of fire-fights between paid-off low scum, mercenaries, and kidnapped individuals. Taking place behind closed doors at abandoned locations around the world, these bloodbaths offer members a no-holds barred 'sport' that at the very least sounds like the alternative to the now banned fox hunting...

In development for eighteen months so far, which coincides with the release of PGR3 as an Xbox 360 launch title at the end of 2005, the concept for The Club originated as an action-shooter for the original Xbox, before they made the decision to push it as a next-gen title. Cue development for Xbox 360 and PlayStation3, and a publishing deal with SEGA announced in May 2006 that re-kindled the relationship between the two outfits (SEGA and Bizarre worked together on the proto-PGR title, Metropolis Street Racer, on Dreamcast).

Since its unveiling last spring, both SEGA and Bizarre have kept very hush hush about the title, aside from releasing a rendered teaser trailer that seemed to confirm The Club as a third-person shooter. Designated a pre-Alpha build of the game, much of what was shown during the recent demonstration was confirmed as Work in Progress including the enemy AI and ragdoll physics, though the speed of the action was such that there was little chance to really get a feel for how unpolished the intelligence of the opponents actually was.

If You Like A Lot Of Chocolate On Your Biscuit Then...

Only a couple of the playable characters were demonstrated by Bizarre, though both were enough of a contrast that it isn't difficult to see what the development team is aiming for. Resembling a younger version of Lethal Weapon's Roger Murtaugh to the point where he might as well exhale "I'm too old for this %$#£..." the character of Renwick is a 30-year veteran of the NYPD, and wears a flack jacket to protect himself from enemy gunfire. The other character played at the demo was a Siberian hunter named Dragov, whose skills in staying alive are all too evident - especially when he insists on ramming through barriers using the thickness of his skull. One interesting aspect of the game is Bizarre's attempt to inject very partisan and loyal relationships between the player and The Club's playable characters. Perhaps best described as 'Marmite', the studio's plan is for players to grow a love/hate relationship with the characters, where online rivalries can grow as time goes on. Much like some of the classic beat-em-ups, the characters of The Club will be at the tournament for their own reasons, such as Renwick's abduction as he investigates the shadowy organisation. Following the likes of Street Fighter II (and every beat-em-up after it), each of the characters will also have their own resolution at the end of the Campaign - though both SEGA and Bizarre acknowledged that how to inject a desire in players to start again with a different character was one of the key challenges to develop before it's release at the end of the year.

Like Epic Games' Gears of War, characters in The Club have a contextual sprint button, but instead of doubling up as a control to enter cover, the sprint button allows the likes of Renwick to kick down wooden barriers without players having to take their finger off the button. The fact that there's this contrast between the contextual function after the initial sprint in Gears and The Club is a good example of how these two 'AAA' third-person shooters differ. The pace of The Club is much faster than a lot of recent shooters, hence the more appropriate analogies to racers, such as the need for players to get 'into the zone' in the game. In what sounds like the ultimate oxymoron, the action demonstrated during our time with The Club was like a highly detailed and dynamic slow-motion fire fight in an action movie, only sped up ten-fold.

The demonstration of the game's main "PGR with Guns" Standard mode is just one of five or six gametypes that the environments will have, with one of them (Survivor) giving players the job of staying alive for as long as possible. In the Standard mode, players have to get their character through to the end of the multi-branched 'course', and achieve the highest score possible. Whilst speed is very much of the essence, it's Bizarre's use of combos that is emphasised the most. Linking kills together in quick succession, or keeping an extended combo together by shooting one of many "skull signs" that dot the map, in many ways the gameplay has a lot in common to the Classic mode in the Tony Hawks games. Keeping a combo going obviously increases the score, but it's also progressively harder to keep a high-multipler going, as the need for kills in an ever quick succession is applied.

Despite confirmation from both SEGA and Bizarre that there's going to be an emphasis on multiplayer gameplay, only a limited amount of details have been announced: nine gametypes will be available in the game (surely the archetypal Deathmatch will be one of them?), with up to sixteen players in a single lobby over Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. Revealing a continuing admiration of the iconic GoldenEye on Nintendo 64, The Club will also feature four-player split-screen mode too, with the aim of re-capturing the essence of the twelve-year old's highly revered multiplayer experience.

...Join The Club

Helping to develop a unique look to the game is Gears of War's concept artist John Wallin, who has created various locations from the demonstrated Saw Mill, to an abandoned small town, and even a beached derelict cruise liner. It's not difficult to see some of the similarities between Wallin's work on the two titles - I don't think that rust has ever been quite so prevalent in videogames before the development of these two titles. With the game set in a contemporary world, Bizarre has also recruited a concept artist to help design the weaponry featured in The Club. Based upon real world guns, their designs have been forged by George Hill. Whilst you may not know the name, you'll have almost certainly seen in work in a number of feature films including, most notably, The Matrix. Both artists have undoubtedly been working to achieve Bizarre's goal of creating a contemporary gameworld with masses of atmosphere, and it'll be exciting to see the finished product arriving on PlayStation3 and Xbox 360.

Even at this stage of development, it's clear that Bizarre are hard at work making sure that the game stands up to the level of next-generation visuals demanded. Fast motion blurs that have been seen in the likes of Capcom's Lost Planet, extensive use of HDR lighting, and particle effects that almost polarised the light flooding through the Saw Mill's massive skylights, were just some of the details demonstrated by the developer. Like their renowned PGR series, Bizarre is building several large scale environments that can then be broken down into various routes and constituent parts depending on the selected game mode or mission. In fact, the area used to show off the Standard 'point-to-point' mode represented between 8%-10% of the Saw Mill map. Detaching the camera from behind the character, Bizarre then headed above the map as a whole, plotting the route that Renwick had taken in the Standard Mode, making it all too clear that the location was pretty big, and offered a significant level of both detail and variety.