Review: Stranglehold
09.27.07 - 04:58pm
Lately I’ve been in a sort of gaming binge in which I pick up a game for a week, play the hell out of it and then drop it for something else. This is rather unusual for me as I usually know which game I want to play and I’ll play this game for months until something else manages to wrench me away. The one benefit of this cycle is that I’ve had the chance to experience some unique and different games. Today I’m going to take a look at Stranglehold, a blockbuster title with John Woo assisting in development and a crack cast of actors including Chow Yun Fat as Inspector Tequila Yuen. Just when I thought hilarious Chinese cop stereotypes wouldn’t cross the divide into gaming I was proven wrong, to much pleasure.
Story
I won’t spoil much here but that’s not saying much as the story isn’t all that deep to start with but what could you expect? The game comes off as a shoot em up movie title ported into a game and it honestly does this very well. You play the role of an ace cop who basically takes the law into his own hands and in the process shoots up damn near all of Hong Kong and a few buildings in Chicago. The goons in the game are split between the Russian Mafia and the Chinese Triads. Just like any decent shoot em up movie you don’t start playing this game hoping to be sucked into a deep and twisted plot, if this were a movie I’d compare it to Smokin Aces or Crank. A lot of people are going to die in awkward and violent ways and you know it.
Graphics
Graphically speaking Stranglehold looked absolutely stunning. Epic Games’ Unreal 3.0 engine is used to great effect along with the Massive D modification which lets the player destroy just about everything within the world. The graphics options within the game are rather limited though so I cannot really comment on how the game looks on lesser hardware but with my hardware frame rates were very good at 1680×1050 with it only getting choppy once when I managed to blow up nearly the entire room I was in and there were chunks of materials and bodies flying all over the place. The textures used in the game range from your obscure tiles for floors, marble walls, doors, and other mundane objects but what really stands out are the character textures. Faces are rendered incredibly life-like, skin looks like skin, and expressions are accurately recreated on the faces. I must say the rendering of the characters, from bosses to goons, really impressed me and while most of this is due to the Unreal 3.0 engine, some credit must be given to Midway and Tiger Hill Entertainment.
Audio
Rarely do I ever comment on the sound effects within games but Stranglehold really excels in this feature. When you shoot a shotgun at a tile wall you hear the report from the shotgun, the crash of the shot hitting the tiles, then the sound of the tiles hitting the floor. Feel like shooting that watermelon in the market? Well it’ll make a nice squishing noise as it blows into little chunks and then you can even hear the chunks hit the ground. When you are in a gun fight with a dozen other goons you can hear them yelling, hear them reloading, and vividly hear their bullets slamming into everything around you. This attention to sound really is what puts the gameplay over the top.
Gameplay
Now for the bad. It is very sad when a game completely fails in it’s execution due to a frustrating design rather than a choppy engine. Within Stranglehold there are a few features that really make the game fun and then a few issues that make it so frustrating that you find yourself yelling at your screen and scaring your neighbors. To start with, lets go with the good.
The Good
Tequila time! Happy Hour!? You could almost call it that, Tequila time is a feature in which you slow down the game and it lets you pull off some truly remarkable shots. Tequila time consumes a bar under your health which slowly recharges but in the roughly 10 seconds of slow-motion you can cause a epic amount of damage.
Interacting with the environment is another huge feature within the game. Run up to a table and hit space-bar and Tequila will kick the table over and duck behind it. Run towards a pillar and Tequila will stand behind it and let you shoot around it all while the goons blast your pillar to pieces. Hit spacebar near a railing on a staircase and Tequila will surf down the railing while slowing down time telling you shoot the goons on the staircase to bits. Just running forward and hitting spacebar will cause Tequila to dive in the air, perfect for diving at enemies with guns blazing. How about that chandelier? Just run at it, hit spacebar, and Tequila will jump and grab it, swinging around while you get to shoot goons from an impromptu trapeze.
I’m guessing John Woo didn’t think Tequila time was a large enough assist in destroying hundreds of henchmen so he included special abilities called Tequila Bombs. By killing enemies you gain points towards these bombs and the more you kill gains you larger bonus’ and doing it in a dramatic way nets you even more. Just walking up to somebody and pulling the trigger is lame, make it dramatic by jumping down the flight of stairs, slow down time, then let loose with your assault rifle. The first bomb will heal you for a moderate amount of damage. The second bomb will slow down time even more so than Tequila time and let you fire off a single powerful shot. The beautiful part of this bomb is that your target will then react in a unique way depending where you shoot them. My personal favorite was shooting goons in the arms and watching them throw their gun away and grab their arm. Sadistic, maybe, but it was so comical watching them jump around. The third bomb, barrage, makes you invincible for a short period of time, gives you an unlimited clip on your current weapon, and dramatically increases the damage of that weapon. This is absolutely perfect for going on a rampage and destroying everything and anything that moves. The fourth bomb turns Tequila into a whirlwind of destruction in which he kills everything in the room. A nice little cinematic sequence occurs as he spins around with guns blazing and doves flying around him, typical of John Woo.
Most fun of all has got to be the “Damage To World” value that you receive at the end of the levels. Actually just completing a level can be very rewarding but having it tally up exactly how much damage you dealt is rather fun. It’s fun to compare with your friends to see who can deal the most damage, my personal best is nearly $32 million, beat that!
The Bad
So… remember how I said you’ll find yourself yelling at your screen? I wasn’t lying. The pictures below show me before and after playing for 20 minutes. Ignore the facial hair, today was my day off =). So how could a game be so frustrating? Well, let me tell you.
The puzzles. Actually, they aren’t really puzzles, more like the designers trying to be crafty by making you shoot specific objects to make paths to progress through and such. A good example of this would be on the second level, there are a series of explosive barrels you must shoot so that certain things fall into place. The only problem is these barrels are hidden behind sheet metal with a small hole that you are supposed to 1)take notice of these barrels and 2)shoot the barrels. After spending 5 minutes walking through the entire level I finally saw the yellow barrels and muttered “no way, #(*&^$(*@&$!!!!!”. This will happen very often and it can be most frustrating.
The masterminds behind the goon squads must have stock in cloning companies. While all the various henchmen all look very unique as the engine does a good job making sure they all have a variety of clothes and weapons, there just are hundreds of them in each level. Most notable is the Chicago Museum, you will enter a room full of dinosaur bones and fossils and a dozen henchmen. Dispatch those henchmen and then another dozen will run in through the doors and shoot you in the back with a shotgun and almost kill you. Not cool when you did this exactly one hundred and fourteen times prior and you have to start back from the checkpoint, four hundred corpses back.
Nobody likes having a gun shoved in their face, let alone six. Periodically you will enter what I can best describe as a systematic torture scene during which a few goons will each have the chance to blast at you while you sit there dodging their shots and try to snap off a shot or two to neutralize them. There’s a scene in the Casino in which you will be surrounded by guys with one guy directly behind you. Survive all the other guys and then the camera will turn and you have a guy 3 feet away from you aiming at your head, goodluck dodging. Repetition I can deal with, bad level designs can also be dealt with, but scenes in which you are forced to stand still and dodge like an idiot can really make you tear your hair out. I think this is a feature that the designers thought “Oh wouldn’t it be so cool to have duels where the player had a chance to individually take out a goon, one at a time” but it ended up being “Oh wow, this isn’t so much fun when you die sixteen times and keep having to slowly suffer through this shootout for the seventeenth time”.
The Verdict
Sadly my feelings on this game aren’t exactly black and white, just a ton of grey. The engine itself and the process of blowing up an entire level is just so damn awesome that it’s hard to think this is a flawed game until I remember the shootouts. The story itself is about average for a First/Third Person shooter so that’s not really decisive. The game itself only contains maybe 8 hours of gameplay, perhaps 10 if you tried to form some sort of strategy rather than running in guns blazing(much more fun). At the end of the day though I know I won’t pick this game up again as the only thing that kept me plowing through the hundreds of goons and completely frustrating shootouts was the desire to beat the game and uninstall it.
Holy cow, nearly 1800 words. Doubt anyone will make it through the end of this, perhaps I should focus on making my thoughts more concise.