Posts tagged the club

I don’t normally go out of my way to get Achievements, but some for The Club sound interesting. This evening I went for the Efficiency Achievement, which involves killing all enemies on a level with fewer than fifty bullets.

Internet gossip has it that the “Veni, Vidi, Vici” level in Venice is the best one for this, so I tried it out. Only fourteen enemies, so with the pistol it should have been easy, and would have been had it not been for the fact that one of the enemies is a bonus enemy who runs quickly across the background of the screen. If you miss him, you don’t get another chance.

So, due to my poor aiming skills it took me a few goes to get the Achievement, but I got there in the end.

And then I decided to play the level some more to see how far up the leaderboards I could get. (On Reckless difficulty, as always. I’ll let you know if and when I up it to Insane.) Managed to get to twentieth before it as time for bed. Not too shabby.

This is excellent. Short bursts of shooty fun. I’m very much looking forward to unlocking everything and going for high scores.

And, as luck would have it, I checked a leaderboard and was 364th in the world, which meant I got two Achievements. Hooray for getting games on release day!

I like the idea of this a lot. Shooter as racing game, where levels are “tracks” that you play over and over again to perfect.

However, the execution seems to be lacking something. To start with, it’s a third-person shooter, where first-person would seem to be a better fit. It seems so obvious that there must be a very good reason for it being in third-person, but I can’t see it for the life of me. I also think the controls are lacking something. The game feels like it should feel Doom-like, but the controls are off to one side of that, more in the standard military third-person shooter camp. Consequently, what should feel fluid just ends up feeling a little cumbersome. That, though, could change with practice, I guess.

The biggest problem for me, though – and it’s a problem nobody else online has mentioned as far as I can tell – is that I found it very hard to pick the brown/grey enemies out from the brown/grey levels. Several times I was looking round to see where I was being shot from, only to realise that someone was standing right next to me and I just hadn’t seen them.

Overall, it’s interesting enough to keep an eye on, but as a full-price release I’ll be skipping it. If I can ever get it for less than a tenner, I might be tempted.