The Club doesn’t talk much: it doesn’t need to.  Things like detailed back story and plot progression do nothing but get in the way of a perfectly good arcade shooter.  The Club itself is an underground blood sport run by the most powerful people in the world, and its participants are usually forced into the game.  The winner of the game is awarded a prize and their freedom, and that’s it.  When playing the game, and I certainly hope you do, don’t think too hard on these things.  They’re really of no consequence, and by the time you ask, "How crazy does Seager have to be to volunteer himself for the Club?", your combo has already started to bleed.

Bizarre Creations, the studio behind Project Gotham Racing, effectively and successfully took PGR’s Kudos system and brought it to the Club in the form of Combos.  Each successful kill earns the player a point total, adjusted by factors like range, style, and accuracy, and increases the combo multiplyer by one.  Chain together kills before the timer runs out, combine them with rolls and turns, and you can gather some serious points.  In addition to kills, combos can be increased or timers reset by finding and shooting "skull shots," small orange signs scattered throughout each stage.

Even the most naturaly gifted gamer will find that memorization is important in the later difficulties.  Casual, the game’s easiest level of difficulty, is almost relaxing in pace and execution, but the gap between Casual and Reckless is sizeable.  As the difficulty scales, more baddies spawn before you that do and take more damage; this improves on your chances of getting a high score, but requires a bit of forehand knowledge.

The game looks decent:  no major hitches to be seen, no significant screen tearing, no framerate hiccups.  It doesn’t do much to push visuals into the stratosphere, but the character models in all cases are detailed enough to satisfy anyone but videophiles.  It sounds much like it looks:  a mix of reasonable audio, mediocre voice acting (aside from the main announcer, who proclaims "Rico-slay" in the most platonicly sexy baritone I’ve heard since UT2k4), and a slew of acceptable environmental sound effects.

The Club’s single player offering is comprised of a Tournament mode, similar to most racing tourneys where your finish in each event adds a point total to a grand total, an Event mode, where you can try each level individually and practice your art, and Gun Play, a set of unlockable event playlists with a cumulative total score set as par. Each event has a specific type.  In most, you’ll find yourself racing against the clock, either to find the level exit before the timer reaches zero or to simply survive for a set period of time.  Others will give your free reign over the level while you blast your way to the exit, but all have a minimum scoring requirement for success (which is nowhere near the score required to place well in a tourney).  When playing through the tournament circuit, I felt as though I were playing the same game type every event and is certainly the biggest disappointment in solo play.