The Club demo on XBL

Anyone check this out? It's an exceptionally finely-tuned 3rd-person shooter that's based around modern-day arena combat. The premise is basically Fight Club with big guns, and it plays sort of like Black-meets-Unreal Tournament with a 3rd person perspective. As you move through a map you are scored based on how quickly, accurately and stylishly you dispatch enemies.

I spent some time tooling around in the single player game last night, and it seems like it has a lot of potential. The combination of gritty shooter with arcade scoring is surprisingly addictive in practice, and the overall presentation is as polished as you might expect from the good folks at Bizarre. I don't know if I'm sold enough on it to pick it up at full price, but if enough GWJers buy in the multiplayer could really make this worthwhile. Anyone else have any thoughts on this one?

I thought the demo was cool too. It's basically Project Gotham Racing (at least its scoring mechanics) meets UT. I wasn't huge on some of the animations or the fact that enemies always seemed to charge at me but it's definitely innovative and I agree, it has a lot of potential. I'll definitely be renting it and if the multiplayer community is there, I'll probably buy it. It's good to see that one of Bizarre's first attempt to break out of the racing genre in the AAA space seems to be working for them.

I played halfway through the retail version last night on the PS3, with the Japanese character Kuro, on the "Casual" difficulty level. Felt like just what I wanted. The controls take a little effort to get to grips with, but that good old score-attack feeling is there. It doesn't feel like very difficult to combo the whole level once you get a few goes in, so I do think I'll be going through this repeatedly. The "lap" gamemode ("Run the gauntlet", maybe? Not sure) is insane, combining the gritty world with thoroughly arcade mechanics. Pure Sega.

I hate to resurrect an old thread, but I'm having a lot of trouble with the Time Attack stages, and I was wondering if there are any hints or tips. GameFAQs doesn't have anything, so I'm appealing to the greater GWJ community for help.