The Club

Shooters are big, serious business these days, but The Club is having none of it - you pick from a range of pre-rolled hard-men caricatures with varying speed, strength and stamina statistics and then gun your way at pace through a series of grimy environments racking up kills as quickly as possible to build up combos.

It's from the makers of Project Gotham Racing. PGR wasn't just a brilliant driving game, it was a brilliant high-scores game, where half the fun came from stringing together absurd combinations of power-slides and overtaking manoeuvres and showing off at high speed in a car. The Club does the same trick of leaning into its source material thematically and mechanically but dancing away from it in design.

The result is a shooter that turns tired genre conventions around with a bullet to the shoulder. You're not just clearing levels to get to the next cut-scene, but you yearn for the next identikit enemy to appear, or for a turret gun to control, because these things keep the combo alive. Self-preservation is a secondary consideration; this is all about timing. An ever-present meter in the top-right ticks down from every kill-shot, forcing you to barrel forward for the next one. If you see an enemy, and you have time, you just keep on running toward them, only capping them when the meter's almost empty, doing a forward-roll beforehand to increase your score takeaway.

So the speed and the sense of linking moves together hangs over from PGR, but instead of learning corners, you learn enemy positions. If you fail to tag someone new in time, or to nail a hidden Skullshot icon in that window, then your combo starts to "bleed", reducing your multiplier, and you need to keep that multiplier up because you're not fighting your way to the end, you're fighting to get a better score than the other players on the leaderboard. When playing alone, these are AI players whose scores are presented to you before each round.

Overall, The Club is brilliantly immediate, logical and rewarding in ways that the PGR games always were and are, and it does for the third-person shooter what no one else has even bothered trying to do: moving it closer to the 2D shoot-'em-ups of old in a manner that appeals anew. In terms of Bizarre's canon, it is what PGR was for cars: familiar concepts designed to be enjoyed over and over rather than gasped at and discarded