Review: Stranglehold
This game definitely gets a Stranglehold on you. It tries to strangle the life right out of you. I have not been this frustrated with a game in a long time. Stranglehold is one of those titles that looks promising on paper: John Woo, Hard Boiled (this is a game sequel to a movie), the Midway Psi-Ops team. A good license, a decent team should make for a good title…unfortunately this time it did not work out. This game falls to the American John Woo curse, which is basically any product done for America is a bust, especially two syllable titles. Examples include: Face/Off, Paycheck, Broken Arrow, Hard Target, need I go on?
The problem with the game is not that it is John Woo, it is the game design. There are some impressive things in Stranglehold. The unparalleled destruction, “Massive-D”, is impressive, however it does not save the title. I am on what I am to guess the final boss fight, so I have played nearly the entire game. And the biggest problem the game suffers from is level design. Level design is just plain sickening. I read a review, I do not know where, he said “by the end of the third level it felt like I killed half the male population of China.” I could not agree more. The game consists of this primary element: Walk into a rectangular room with a balcony above you. Kill 10-30 bad guys. Walk over a trigger point. Spawn another 10-30 bad guys. Kill them. Rinse, Lather, Repeat. This is the formula and it gets old very quickly. A few levels have a more spacious flow to it, but the use of the destructible components make the levels feel cramped and immovable.
This brings me to problem number two, control. Control is amazingly bad. This character is supposed to be a nimble bad-ass dolling out death and destruction, at least he deals out the later. He controls like a shopping cart with one bad wheel. The system has two features that prove to be more annoying then helpful. The world is auto-interactive in most cases. Come to a table or bar slide over it. Some things you can interact with, like hide behind a pillar or kick up a table for protection, or jump up onto a railing and run along it. This game offers bullet-time, tequilla time, slo-mo, matrix time, what ever you wan to call it, and when you execute a slide or a run up a railing it automatically enters you into this mode, even if only for a second. I found this highly annoying and disruptive to the flow. This is the same foe, the automatic interactivity, just as problematic, if not more so. This just disrupts your targeting and flow. Aiming can be an issue too, sometime bullets go straight other times they go off into oblivion. One thing that would have helped the game is an experience system. So at the end of levels I can choose to upgrade accuracy, bullet-time, ammo-clips, etc. This allows me to customize the game the way I find it fun. This is a new trend in gaming, giving the player options to play the game with the character they partial designed. The extensive world destruction adds a level of game play, but it doesn’t do enough to create that variety.
There is a mini-game that is just as frustrating as the regular game, the Mexican stand-of. In this mini-game, if you consider it one, you are forced to go one on one with many enemies, you can dodge right or left with the right thumb sitck while you aim with the left. After you kill or miss one guy you spin around to the next, so on and so fourth until they are dead, you die, or they are mostly beaten. This sounds interesting, but it seems some bullets cannot be dodged no matter what. Which is fine, it just makes it difficult.
The game is full of problems, it looks great from a technology stand point on what you can do, but this game was in development for a long time and looks O.K. Control is fairly bad, or at least take a while to get used to. I have not even played mulitplayer, from what I hear though it is a joke. If you have to play the game rent it. If you know all of these downsides going in, you might enjoy it more then I did. It just seemed like a exercise in frustration.
On a side note, I hear the Blu-Ray Collectors edition with the Hard Boiled transfer looks just as good, if not worse, then the Criterion DVD on a player that will up-res to 720p/1080i/1080p. No one decided to spend the money to really make it a added bonus. Save your money if you already own the DVD.
August 21st, 2008 at 9:21 am
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