Stranglehold
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ESRB:
Blood,Drug Reference,Intense Violence
Publisher: Midway Genre(s): Action, Shooting Home Page: http://www.strangleholdgame.com/
Beautiful destructionVisually, Stranglehold is a bit of a mixed bag. Overall, the style and look works for me: the main thing - utter mayhem and destruction of everything possible around you - is portrayed well enough, and the levels, while heavily scripted and "on rails", look mostly very nice and work well with the gameplay.
The game mixes up pre-rendered clips with in-engine cutscenes pretty well. Again, on the consoles it is almost impossible to spot what's pre-rendered and what's in-engine, as the pre-made scenes are also created with a style very close to the actual game engine. On the PC at high resolutions, the difference is easier to spot, but the jump between pre-rendered video and real-time graphics doesn't distract from the story or the action.  Closeups best show the wildly varying texture quality - compare the face to the left background texture here. During the action, the most obvious visual flaw comes from developing for the capabilities of the Xbox 360. The game is very much designed to be played at 720p, and at higher resolutions on the PC the low-res user interface elements and the wildly varying overall texture resolution stands out. While character textures and some detail elements are done at very high resolution, many secondary background elements are textured at the lowest possible resolution that looks acceptable at 720p. The problem here is that the material, which looks fine at 720p, tends to stand out at on the PC screen when the resolution is bumped up to 1600x1200 or higher - at times, like a sore thumb. All common normal and widescreen resolutions are supported and in fact, if at all possible, Stranglehold should be played using a widescreen TV; that way the visuals look noticeable better than on a "too good" PC monitor. Another way to hide the rough spots is to play at a lower resolution, assuming you are using a CRT or a TFT that has good scaling for non-native resolutions. In addition to the texture flaws, the lighting feels also a bit "off" at times. Overall the game is too brightly lit and at times it feels like all the effort has gone into modeling and texturing all the bits and pieces that make up the levels, and lighting has been thrown in as bit of an afterthought. Serious hardware not optional Stranglehold's minimalistic selection of graphical options. Another reason for playing at a low resolution might be the hardware requirements. Stranglehold on the PC is a complete 1:1 port of the Xbox 360 as far as the visuals go. No low resolution texture settings, no simpler shaders for low end cards - the only graphical options are the resolution switch, the enabling of dynamic shadows and the use of decals. While dynamic shadows do affect the frame rate, in practice Stranglehold has exactly one meaningful graphics option - the resolution you play in. When the minimum requirements were first published, they were met with disbelief - in part because they were highly unusual. People reacted in shock to the requirement of a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM, and these were discounted as implausible when the video card was set at "GeForce 7800 / Radeon X1300 or higher". As X1300 is nowhere near GeForce 7800 in performance, the requirements looked bogus. Then Midway quickly moved in, stating that they were "preliminary". To mix things up even more, a pre-sale box on display in some stores actually sported completely different and much lower minimum requirements. The final box has the same requirements that were originally reported on the Midway forums - and believe or not, they are actually very realistic. This thing eats baby PCs and keeps asking for more. While a dual core CPU is not strictly required, it's an easy way to indicate the minimum CPU. Only the fastest available single core CPUs can manage to run the game without hitting a CPU limit wall when the action heats up, and the Unreal 3 engine uses all available cores, so a slower dual core CPU can run the game better than a fast single core one. 2GB RAM is also the practical minimum; with Windows XP, you can get away with just 1.5GB, but no matter what, we could not get the game to start with just 1GB. You get to the opening menu, but as soon as you load the first level the game simply hangs with a black screen, and with the Vista's customary "add 512MB for the operating system shiny" rule, the 2GB RAM requirement on the box is accurate. Shader Model 3.0 in full use
As is common with the games using the latest Unreal engine, a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card is required to get the game up and running. The requirements are close to reality in this regard if you ignore the X1300 snafu. Yes, the game starts on an ATI Radeon X1300, but with the frame rate dipping to single digits at 1024x768, it just isn't playable unless you fancy playing at 640x480. An NVIDIA GeForce 7800 on the other hand can easily handle things around 30fps with up to 1280x1024 resolution. We set the YouGamers minimum slightly lower with a Radeon X1800 GTO or GeForce 7600 GT, as they also managed to stay above 30fps in most situations at 1024x768 and the game felt fully playable. At the high end, the sky is the limit. The YouGamers recommended system (using a
I'm skipping the customary comparison shots for minimum and recommended systems simply because the game looks the same across the hardware spectrum - if the thing starts, you get effectively the same visuals as with the best systems out there. The only variable is the resolution as the dynamic shadows don't really alter the performance that much. Stranglehold also requires 15GB of hard disk space, and comes on two dual-layer DVD9 disks. While we couldn't verify the stories that some digital download versions of the game would actually require up to 50GB of space during install, I can confirm that the retail boxed game will install happily as long as you have that 15GB on any one of your drives.
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