Welcome, gamers, to perhaps the most honest and straightforward release of the year. The Club is a simple game, even a throwback to the arcade presentation of the ‘good old days', where high scores were enough to keep you interested in a game for weeks or even months. Oh, how we lament those lost years of our youth! Don't we?

The Club's premise is easy enough to describe: third person shooter meets racing game. Well, that probably doesn't make much sense after all, but in effect, what you have here is something that looks like your average gun fest but plays more like Project Gotham Racing, which is no coincidence seeing as The Club was developed by Bizarre Creations, who are famous for said racing series.

The game's story is quite frankly, almost non existent. Apparently, some rich club (wow, I wonder how they came up with the name then) owns half the world and is able to hold secret tournaments where some of the world's worst criminals, asylum escapees and just general bad-arses can duke it out to the death in tight, confined stages. This is where you come in, choosing a no-personality character and going on a morally ambiguous killing spree across the world. The premise seems possibly pulled straight out of any number of bad eighties movies (except for Arnie's Running Man, now that was cool) and severely lacks any sort of depth, character building and story.

But that's not what you're here for as the entire object of the game is to get a high score by killing enemies and, if possible, stringing those kills together to keep your combo meter running. Enemy positions are static - they appear, for most modes, in exactly the same place every time you play a level - so the ‘skill' comes from memorising this placement and nailing headshot after headshot to better your own score.

Scattered around each level are targets called Skullshots, which keep your combo going up when shot. These are placed tactically, allowing you to effectively string kills together for the entire level. In fact, the first few hours with The Club are quite engaging, as you come to learn the placement and position of enemies and skullshots in each level. You'll even spend quite a bit of time with the game replaying the cooler levels to try and get a better high score or rack up achievements.

However, the main problem we have with The Club is that there are only a few game types and there simply isn't enough variety to keep most gamers engaged. Granted, racing games are repetitive by nature, but there are still elements of uncertainty in each race, such as opponents cutting in on you and/or changing weather conditions. The Club's repetitive gameplay means that once you've played through the single player game (which will only take four hours or so), there's no real incentive to go back through it. And it's not like you can just fire up a different game mode for some variety because all of the main options are extremely homogeneous - to the point where you're sometimes not even sure what mode you're actually playing. Everything just blends together into a generic gunplay soup.

First up there's the straightforward ‘get to the end of the level' mode, called Sprint, where you can take your time exploring the level, maybe find all those hidden green targets (which are of course linked to an achievement). Next are Siege and Survival modes (themselves hard to distinguish), where you must stay within particular boundaries and survive an onslaught of respawning homicidal maniacs. The most interesting mode is Run The Gauntlet, as it's this one that plays most like a racing game. Running the gauntlet entails a ‘track' that you must traverse multiple times, with bad guys popping out constantly and your time ticking away. It's a lot like Time vs. Kudos, for better or worse.

While the premise of The Club is certainly interesting - from a design viewpoint - the execution of that idea is sadly quite pedestrian. Although there are ‘levels' that span the globe - Venice is one of the distinct locations on offer - others, such as Warehouse and Prison Cells, exemplify a ‘could be anywhere' aesthetic. Each level features claustrophobic, pre-defined paths, and there are also sometimes variations of each run, much like those racing games that give you one big track and simply open up different paths for different race types.

The Club looks nice enough with plenty of today's obligatory motion blur, and can, at times look great, but it's also let down by some drab environments and murky textures. Aiming felt a bit floaty, but there is an auto lock on feature that makes running and gunning very easy to get into. Apart from the ability to shoot windows and smash through wooden gates there's no environmental interaction on offer, which further enforces the static mood of the game and even blowing the crap out of gas canisters gets old quick. It feels fake and in the end you just don't have any ongoing incentive to play. Sure, the thought of beating your own score is cool for a few hours but once this wears off you're left with a fairly shallow game with almost no replay value.

"Hah!” you exclaim. "There's always multiplayer, Mr. Reviewer Guy.” Well, yes, there is this ubiquitous option with The Club, but if there is a non-laggy match in existence then we can't find it. The whole run and gun approach of the single player game is thrown out the window for multiplayer - leaving you with a rehash of the game's single player levels as a stage for players running around madly and trying to miss each other with their weapons for five minutes. The only interesting multiplayer mode is Hunted Killer, where the first person to make a kill becomes the ‘hunted'. But as we said, it's a one way trip to lag city, there's barely any Aussies playing The Club online and we can't really recommend it if you're purely after an online shooter.

Really, there's nothing actually wrong with The Club, per se. It is fun. For a while. A lot of it does look nice and there is a sense of achievement in finding all the skullshots and stringing together a huge big kill combo. Aside from the obvious shallowness it's really quite a hard game to criticise, but also a hard game to recommend at full price. A weekend rental at best, if only to see that Bizarre Creations are in no way, one trick ponies, (kudos to them for trying something new) and we hope that this spurs them to try their hand at other genres.