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::PUBLISHER::
Midway
::DEVELOPER::
Midway
::GENRE::
Action/Adventure
::RELEASE DATE::
12/30/99
::PLAYERS::
1
::LIVE::
None
::COST::
$59.99
::FEATURES::
480P/720P/1080i, In-Game Dolby Digital
Good: Looks Great, Physics are Top Notch, Helps Ease Itchy Trigger Fingers
Bad: Confusing Puzzles, Mind-numbing Repetition, Frustrating Shootouts
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Stranglehold Review Rewind
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We go back and take a look at Stranglehold, videogame sequel to John Woo’s Hardboiled. Check out all the crazy kung-fu gun-wielding action inside.
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Stranglehold is 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, with uneasy pleasure.
The story isn’t deep to start, although it is a shoot em’ up movie title ported into a game and it honestly does this very well. You play the role of ace cop, Tequila Yuen, 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, in terms of storytelling, it compare it to “Smokin’ Aces” or “Crank”. A lot of people are going to die in awkward and violent ways and you know it.
If you’re the type of person who actually wants to see the cutscenes, you won’t be disappointed, as there’s a lot to offer. Overall, the story is pretty entertaining, with some of the boss encounters being a bit annoying, but it takes about five hours to beat the game on normal difficulty.
Graphically speaking, Stranglehold looked absolutely stunning. Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 is used to great effect along with the Massive D modification which lets the player destroy just about everything within the world though only getting choppy once you level an entire room. 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.
Cool water effects like this make the UE3 stand out.
Stranglehold really excels in sound design, or at least, action wise. When you shoot a shotgun at a tile wall you hear the roar of 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 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 is what really puts the gameplay over the top. Minor glitches like the terrible cutscene problems also draw this game back on a field it performed so well in. During cutscenes you can’t hear anything that is going on, forcing you to either ignore what little story is there, or crank it up just to hear a little dialogue, only to get your ear-holes blown out by a bunch of gunplay a minute later.
The game completely fails in its 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, but there is plenty of good also.
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