Oh no doubt, I love the Club. Bulletstorm was trying to a similar thing (high score runs etc.) with some different mechanics around it, but then got stuck with the demand of having a story mode to link it all together, burying the high scoring fun part of the game. It might not have worked as well as the Club did, fair, but the marketing did it no favors when it tried to make it out to be free form stunts ala THPS, instead of maximizing scores on limited resources ala The Club.
At least the story was kinda a funny deflation of mid 00s shooter toughguys, but yeah, it didn’t even need to be there, and gatekeeping the actual game behind it was a silly mistake.