Stranglehold
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ESRB:
Blood,Drug Reference,Intense Violence
Publisher: Midway Genre(s): Action, Shooting Home Page: http://www.strangleholdgame.com/
Everything is shot to piecesAs is customary in John Woo's films, everything around the hero gets shot to bits while the hero quickly moves from cover to cover trying to dodge the non-stop hail of bullets whizzing by. This is faithfully recreated in Stranglehold with the highly modified Unreal 3 engine. The modification is named "Massive D", and it allows complete and utter destruction on a whole new scale. Sure, in earlier games we've seen decals on the walls, boxes shattering to a cloud of debris that quickly vanishes, but Stranglehold takes things a few steps further to present authentic John Woo-style action.
While parts of the destruction is still "faked" with normal tricks such as decal work and sprite-based debris clouds, the developers have been very creative in the dark art of visual trickery. The cheats are mixed in with real breakup of objects and predetermined parts of the level and the combined effect works very well. And it's not just a couple of specific parts and objects - the engine actually supports the deconstruction of almost every object and big parts of the level geometry, with large chunks actually staying around. It's entirely possible to redecorate whole rooms in all kinds of creative ways while blowing away piles of bad guys. As a side-effect, cover is not absolute - hide behind a pillar, and the bad guys will shoot it to pieces, with major chunks actually falling off and staying on the floor as physical objects. The same goes for overturned tables, statues, boxes and most other objects present.
Falling objects can also damage both Tequila and his opponents, and there are many "trick shot" spots indicated with a glow. Shooting these spots trigger a breakdown of the scenery object that might take out an enemy or two. In many places the thugs actually tend to stay in spots scripted up for such fancy kills, and it's all obviously set up that way. But hey, while it might feel a bit fake, it is immensely stylish and cool - and stays true to the John Woo films. No gamepads, this is the PCRefreshingly, the game is fully ported for the PC as far as the controls go. All references in the game relate to the keyboard and the mouse - up to the point that the game actually doesn't support gamepads at all. In a way this is surprising, as I always thought that Xbox 360 pad support was part of the Games for Windows certification, and the game is GFW-tagged. Difficulty level is also adjusted with the controls. While on the Xbox 360 at casual level the thugs truly could not hit the broad side of a barn, on the PC they have regained some accuracy, and on the normal level their numerical superiority starts to show. At times, even on the normal level, the game actually suggested me that I could always adjust the difficulty level down - obviously this was due to the intense difficulty and not due to the playskill of the reviewer. Obviously. [too right - Ed]
The unlockable Hard-Boiled level actually lives up to the name, and even with the super-accurate mouse aiming you are hard pressed at picking off the hostiles quickly enough to survive as the weather forecast includes intense hailstorm of bullets with a chance of local showers that include rockets and heavy machine gun fire.
Related Stuff Games: Stranglehold
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