High-intensity shooter The Club is actually closer to a racing game than your average blastfest, according to developer Bizarre Creations, creator of the top notch 360 racer Project Gotham Racing. So they should know.

"Think of it like a racing game," lead designer Matt Cavanagh told the Official UK PlayStation Magazine in a recent interview. That's because the game works by thrusting you into bite-sized levels - each lasting three or four minutes long on a good "run" - where you nail through a succession of bad guys, attempting to chain kills together to gather multipliers for your level score.

"We wanted it to be one of those pad-grabbing games that you can't wait to play," says Cavanagh. "It's like a driving game where you get to a certain point and you know what your time should be - or what your combo should be - and if you get to that point and know you're not going to get it, then you just restart."

The crucial point is that your enemies aren't that clever - they do the exact same things every time, allowing you to prepare, learn and eventually predict the actions of each level's cannon fodder to create spectacular action sequences. Shoot a guy you know is coming while spinning 180 degrees, say, or ricochet a shot off a metal plate and into the brain of the jerk around the corner, before you even see him.

It's also a bit like Burnout's Crash Junctions, where you barrel into a predictable situation, aiming to cause as much carnage as possible. Only, in The Club, you're trying to kill as many guys as quickly as possible in as stylish and fluid a manner as you can. Ammo, pick ups and Skull Points, which lengthen the eight second window you have to chain kills, are all off the main path - do you risk losing time to grab them?

Bizarre Creations always said that The Club would do for shooters what Project Gotham did for racers, echoing that game's Kudos style-centric points system. And it's looking like that's going to be the case - only with the added bonus of doing what Burnout did for racing games, by creating a breathless, unstoppable rampage of a game where slowing down to think is the quickest way to fail. Excited yet?

March 7, 2007