Death by Numbers: The Club

Bizarre Creations explains why its new action game is more like a driving game.

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Part of the reason people play through the Tony Hawk games as many times as they do is because of the range of characters, and it's no different in The Club. There are eight main characters, each with their own particular style and attitude. There's Dragov, the hulking Russian brute, Renwick, the tough city cop, and Seager, the millionaire adrenaline junkie simply there for the kicks, among others. Holding the gang together is The Secretary, the man at the heart of the international Club organization. Each of the characters brings a different feel to the experience, a unique sense of motivation to give you a different take on the bloodshed going on all around you.

The score-focused game design elevates the importance of the levels in The Club, much the same way tracks are so important in Bizarre's racing series. And similar to those games, Bizarre took a holistic approach, emphasizing detail only afterwards that was based on the design goals. "We build our levels much the same way we build the cities in Project Gotham Racing. We build the entire location and build routes through it," says Davis.

There are eight locations in The Club that are scattered around the world, taking you from an abandoned German steel mill, to a country house in England and a wrecked ocean liner at sea. Tying them together is a sense that this is the sort of place where you would be able to kill people indiscriminately without the police checking in too often.

These eight locations are variously populated with nine different types of game modes. There are score and time attack modes and King of the Hill-esque ones, where you need to control territory, and many others too. None of them is demanding of your time, though. There are hour-long missions here. Bizarre has made sure to make this a jump-in-and-jump-out experience, one that you could spend five minutes or an hour playing and still get a thrill. "Each game mode has got its own kind of intensity," says Davis.

What's missing is an emphasis on multiplayer. Davis explains that since this is the first stab at this type of game for Bizarre the team was more concerned with getting the core elements of the game right. Clearly the hope is that this is a game that will stretch into a franchise in the future.

Before that, though, Bizarre needs a good reception for this first instalment. We'll see if the team gets it when The Club is released on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 8 February 2008.

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