Some shooters claim to be different from their peers, but none can boast that fact quite as well as The Club. The game is the end result of the more or less successful marriage of a puzzle base to a shooter, making you not only worry about staying alive but also about how to best string together the carnage to attain the highest score. The idea is fresh and well thought out, but for as much as it brings to the genre there are plenty of stumbling blocks and frustrations.

You play the role of a competitor in a fierce blood sport where to compete one much not only kill scores of enemies but also do so quickly and with as much style as possible. Each of the eight playable characters have their own reasons for participating in the competition, but their motivations are never really explored or revealed in anything other than brief snippets. The game’s ‘plot’ is admittedly bare bone, serving as little more than a vehicle to deliver a basic backdrop for the game’s premise—to run around and shoot stuff.

The competition is broken up into a series of rounds that make use of a range of game types. In one game mode you must simply fight your way to the end of the level, while others modes may add a time limit or make you remain in a relatively enclosed space and simply survive until the end. Regardless of the mode, the overall goal remains the same: get as many points as humanly possible using any means necessary. When a player places in a round they gain tournament standing points for the current tournament they are in, and after the final round whoever is in the top spot is deemed the winner. Grabbing top honors is difficult but unnecessary, as progression to the next tournament is still unlocked as long as you complete the tournament.

If you simply run through a level and gun everyone down in a hail of fire, you will likely find yourself at the very bottom rung of the ladder come the end of the round. To rack up the big scores players must juggle their speed and efficiency just as much as they must worry about how to kill in a stylish manner and keep their current combo alive. Simply killing an enemy will net the player points and start a combo, and killing subsequent enemies keeps the combo multiplier ticking up.

You have a certain amount of time where you must get a kill again after the last one to keep the current combo alive, and the higher the multiplier the shorter that time is. Once the time limit has been reached the multiplier quickly begins to fall back down to nothing, and your potential for a high score with it, unless you make a kill to lock it back in again. Another way to keep a combo alive is by shooting one of the many skull sign plates which are hung up throughout every level, which immediately raises the multiplier by another point and refreshes its timer.

Keeping combos alive by killing enemies is only half the battle however; how you kill an enemy is just as important as the frequency with which you kill them. Headshots, shooting enemies from medium or long range, or killing them using the last bullet in your clip all net additional points than killing them in a normal manner would.

While the game is a fast and furious stylized shooter, one of the biggest faults the title has is with how muddy the controls feel. Starting and stopping moving have a delay from input to effect, which makes movement in the game an exercise in momentum more than anything resembling crisp and responsive. Aiming your weapons can be done either with using the optional auto aim or free aiming, and while with auto aim on can make the game feel a bit too easy the controls without it make for overly difficult for fine motions such as lining up headshots. The sensitivity can be adjusted, but on any setting fine motions are still difficult to pull off.