While I enjoy 'The Club' quite a bit, but looking at this for most people I would give this a 'mixed' rating as you still have to manually fix some things yourself and most people don't want to do that nor should they. I am going to specifically look through the lenses of the game itself especially at the $3-4 range I got it on sale for, don't buy for $15 100%.
'Games For Windows Live' plagues this game and it might not have been to much of an issue since the service still actually works, but the version sold here on Steam is outdated meaning you will have to install a newer patch yourself, you could get Windows/Xbox achievements doing this and if the online wasn't dead you'd be able to play that as well, but if you don't want to deal with it like me then downloading XLiveless off [url=https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/576-xliveless/] PCGamingWiki [/url] and just dropping those DLLs in your main folder solves the issue instantaneously. Now you won't get the achievos, but you'd be stuck in singleplayer regardless so I didn't care, especially since they aren't Steam achievements anyway.
You will play as one of the 8 characters presented and you are brought into this tournament called 'The Club,' in which everybody competes in a plethora of locations trying to be #1 on the leaderboard gaining points through everyone's favorite activity murder. It's a lot like 'Twisted Metal,' force a bunch of guys into something with the chance of being able to not just win a prize, but also freedom..... for most of the cast at least. There isn't a whole lot here in terms of story, but this was developed second after gameplay and it shows with how short the cutscenes are and how little of them are here.
Gameplay is a straight up blast to play though. Matt Cavanagh, the lead designer had described the game as "a racing game with guns," and that's exactly what it is. For most of the rounds you will run as fast as you can from point A murdering goons and thugs while trying to keep your combo alive building up the highest score possible to point B escaping. It's simple, but it works and is very fun. There are 2 other types of rounds where you will stay in a spot and survive while the clock counts down, being strapped with a bomb that if you left the specific area for over 5 seconds causing the player to blow up, but the goal of gathering points is the same, the shooting is still competent enough for these to be fun, but not as fun as running through levels, these feel like an afterthought 100%. Any other mode only really adds timer to the main mechanic so it doesn't change much.
Running through these levels you will build up combos by killing enemies and shooting skull signs, you want to keep this building as much as you can to gather the most points possible, but you also have to change up the way you play. You will gain less points if you repeatedly kill enemies without ADS, but then you might gain more by ADS, or if you do an action (dodge roll) to get a "Death Roll," etc. While it doesn't need you to change it all the time to actually gain points, it does make you think about changing your playstyle just a bit. Skull signs are here just to simply keep combos going so they don't bleed out. Don't even go for secret skull signs unless there is an achievement for them as these don't continue your combo and don't give you additional points. The game will also present secret paths or secret rooms that may give you a secret skull sign, ammo, or health, but all these do is bleed your combo out so don't even take the risk unless you might need health or ammo, which is a gamble. These "off the beaten path" sections of levels also feel like an after though as why would you divert the player in an "against the clock" TPS, unless it was to punish the players, but even if you lose a combo points are easy to garner so it doesn't feel like a punishment more of an afterthought instead.
As far as the levels themselves go, I don't have to much of an opinion, besides the beaten paths that lead to dead ends in most levels the paths themselves are pretty linear. Albeit once you start going to like the halfway point they really start to feel cluttered which battles against the FOV itself, there isn't any setting for FOV so by cluttering debris all over the place also having screen crunch, it can sometimes take a second to differentiate things in a level. This doesn't make the game impossible by any means, I just want to point it out.
As stated above. $15 is a no go, but for $3-4 I can dig it. If you are uncomfortable going through modding/patching older PC games this is also a no, which not that a person should have to do this regardless, but at a certain price point I ignore it. I recommend it as it's a fun game that is obtained at a cheap price quite regularly, I also opted out of GFWL and used XLiveless instead so it also wasn't a hard time getting up and running. Moral of my core feeling is that while this game is a blast, it also feels full of afterthoughts that make the game feel on a "tech demo" basis, not that it takes away very much, but still.
