ORIGINAL: Silentbomber
I dont even know what its about.
It' s a 3rd person combo based shooter developed by Bizarre Creations and published by Sega. It kinda works like Total Overdose (Chili Con Carnage) or uh... Tony Hawks... where you get points for stringing kills together. It' s obviously based on the RE4 Mercenaries mode...
Since Bizarre are a top tier studio i had pretty high hopes for The Club, especially given that their last few games (PGR3/4 & Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved) have all been amazing. However, my initial impressions are not favourable...
The demo allows you to play as one of the planned eight characters, namely Dragonov - a wanted Russian criminal. There is a single level available and 2 " events" . The level is a prison and the events are a score challenge and a time trial. You get points for each enemy you kill, depending on how you kill them and what weapon you' re using... i guess it plays very much like an arcade game.
The character design and model are pretty good. Cliched yes, but i think that' s what they were going for. The level design and graphics in general are next-gen... but like in the PS3 version of ProStreet, there' s an odd fullscreen blurring that i don' t expect to see in the 360 version. When stationary, everything looks pretty bad. When you' re moving it looks better because the game employs actual motion blur.
So first things first... the graphics are good, apart from the wierd blurring. The explosions and physics are lame but the animations and texture detail are fine. I do however expect the 360 version to look better, even if it' s just clearer.
The controls are unexpectedly rubbish. On 360 the same setup would be ok, but using L2 and R2 for ' close aim' and ' fire' respectively sucks ass - which is why Infinity Ward used L1 and R1 instead. There' s no way to change it in the options (in the demo) either which is annoying.
R1 is ' sprint' , square is ' reload' , x is used for rolling or context sensitive actions like bashing down doors or jumping over barriers etc..., circle throws a grenade... blah blah blah...
The controls barely even matter because your character handles like shit. It may be because Dragonov is a big tank-like guy but if that' s the case then they chose the wrong character for the demo.
The weapons are meh... nothings special, ...they just feel weak. Headshots give more points but the aiming is so off there' s no point in even trying. Just shoot and hit whatever, sprint to the next group of guys, rinse and repeat. It' s boring.
Now like i said, it plays a lot like the Mercenaries mode in RE4... but it' s nowhere nears as good. The kills aren' t satisfying, the weapons blow, the enemies just fall over... it' s like they took the Mercenaries mode and injected it with gallon upon gallon of camel piss.
What a waste of development time. It' s no wonder they delayed the game... it' s not fun.