You can go two ways when checking out The Club. You can be a hardened gamer and quickly figure out after an hour’s play the game isn’t quite there. Or you can look to the future and salute Bizarre Creations’ vision. Either way, you’re likely to be relegating this one to storage earlier than you probably would like.

That’s the brutally honest short version. The long version? The Club nails a lot of things. The attitude and presentation are top quality. It looks pretty good. The idea is brilliant. But the overall experience is lacking. Two years from now you won’t be sitting at a bar with your friends trading trash talk about your performances in The Club. There won’t be any “remember the time I did…” moments, no stories to embellish and get more improbable.

If this sounds a little misty and wistful, it’s because the thinking behind The Club is so on the money, the idea driving the game so long overdue it’s a shame. Remember Black, EA’s gorgeously dumb shooter? That was probably the first gun action game to toy with the idea of style overcoming substance. The Club takes things further. Here, score is king – and central to play is your combo timer, which you keep ticking by doing crazy stuff like shooting people and… shooting people. You’re encouraged to be in perpetual motion, moving through levels as quickly as possible. This is not set up to be hyper realistic, so you can take some punishment before going down – there’s a fine line here between throwing away survival instinct and encouraging you to get close enough to bust out some slick moves.

One major problem is that while it’s easy to see what Bizarre Creations are aiming for here – the third person shooter equivalent of Project Gotham, a series that celebrates driving with style as much as speed. The issue is there’s not as much to do in-game as your typical race track. You won’t think you’ve fallen asleep and woken up in Assassin’s Creed here – the actual number of different moves for your guy on screen are limited. A context button acts as a “do-all” function when you need to bash down a door or circumvent a given obstacle, but again, it’s not the same as being able to run sideways up any wall you please and deliver a kick to the face, is it? In the end your high score and combo multiplier comes down to your aim under pressure – there’s nothing wrong with that, but it proves a little restrictive in comparison to the subtleties of maintaining a soaring number of Kudos with an out of control beast of a Ferrari weaving all over the shop.

The formula does hold promise. Once you get your head around the fact you’re expected to rapidly remember where the bad guys pop out from, you do start to think in terms of speed and enjoyment rather than creeping forward at a combo-crippling pace. But even so you rarely get into the zone here, you don’t have the world fade to a blur as you rip through a level trying to better your score ranking.

Part of the issue here is the controller – sorry to harp on the same topic, but analogue sticks just will never cut it as a shooter aiming device for anyone but the most practiced of gamers. Call of Duty 4, Gears of War et al help disguise the issue through clever staging, the use of cover and adopting a more deliberate pace. In The Club you’re expected to be on the move constantly – no ducking for cover, just flat strap hit-them-before-they-hit-you. The pace in turn emphasises how fiddly it can be to run and aim effectively with a controller – rewarding for the upper echelon of players, but a steep learning curve for the rest of us.

Therein lies The Club’s biggest irony. The game is presented in a dead sexy fashion; it’s got the kind of intro that would not look out of place in a Guy Richie movie (pre Madonna infection, natch). In this case a flashy Lock Stock-style sequence cuts introduce us to the members of The Club as they are recruited. Despite some drab levels, the player characters tend to appear a hint caricature-esque and are fleshed out as well as any action story. It all adds up to something you can grab your non gamer mates and have a play and a laugh – ‘cept of course they won’t have a chance. Fun for the skilled, intimidating for the rest. Not enough balance exists between seeing cool stuff as a good player, and feeling like a sluggish gimp as a poor player.

In optimistic-world, where everyone has perfect teeth and doesn’t watch reality TV, The Club would have been the spiritual child of the frothy action movies of the Eighties. You know the kind - where a rag-tag group of anti-heroes reluctantly band together to beat the tar out of a bunch of henchmen, ultimately defeating the curiously effete evil genius (after first humiliating him with their superior one liners). Playing the game would have been like a whole series of highlights from The Matrix – spectacular moves and whatnot – with a thin yet distinguishable tether to reality.

In the real world, it’s an action movie concept with slick execution that fails to deliver, hampered by the fact The Club cost the player on the street roughly three times the amount it does to pick up a action flick from the shops. It quite obviously has been made with a different goal in mind, but the end result is sadly limited beyond the promise.