With the birth of the arcade downloadable titles on consoles, we saw the death of budget titles released on disk. By budget titles, I'm talking of the games which didn't cost a lot to make, often were made by a small team and more often than not used less that half of the 8.3 GB of the space on the disk. This is a shame as often these games were fun, if slightly flawed titles. The Club is a great example of this. This 3rd person shooter focuses on in-your-face action and points scoring combos. You choose one of 6 characters, 50 Cent unfortunately not included, and take part in competitions in different locations. Each competition or tournament features a selection of events, either killing enemies to get points combos, holding off enemies for as long as you can or running through stages as quickly as possible. These events all take place on the same stage and you compete against enemy bots to see who can get the highest score. There are around 8 maps in the game, none of which are particularly exciting, but the tournament style events and the combo hunting gameplay is pretty decent. I enjoyed racking up some big scores and getting a run just right and there is a nice addictive feeling to the short levels. You string together combos by killing enemies in quick succession and getting special kills like headshots or multi-kills, all of which add to a point multiplier which will start to drop if you stop killing. This creates a fast and frantic style of gameplay, and while I found the camera a little lacking, the controls were decent and the gameplay was quite smooth. My main issue with the game is that this is all there is to it. Sure you can replay levels to get higher scores if you like that kinda thing, but that's about it. There's not really a lot here and it does become repetitive fairly quickly. Overall it's a fine game, but I doubt many people will invest much time with this one.

If you like score-attack games, you'll love this one. It's a focused arcade shooter that does one thing and does it well. The closest alternative would probably be the Mercenaries mode in the Resident Evil series. Trying to get the high score and improving your runs is very addictive. It can easily be played in short bursts, as most levels don't take too long to complete.

My complaints would be the insanely high score cap on the highest difficulty, and confusing level design that can make you lose precious time and combo.

It can be a bit of a pain to set up if you're playing on the PC. I'd highly recommend checking out the PC Gaming Wiki on how to install GFWL and the automatic title update.

Occasionally I get a hair up my ass to replay this and try to like prove that it's good or something, but I never get around to it. In my memory, this is one of my favorite 360 games because it does something actually interesting with shooting levels by making them this ridiculous speed shooting competition with combos. I do not remember how well it moves or plays, just that I was adamant there was something here. I suppose I still like feeling like I had some kind of insight about action, but I don't know that I really want to put this particular experiment back to the test ever again. I will think about doing it at least another dozen times in my life.