Stranglehold
A few years ago I played through Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (think the name is bad? You should check out the story!) from developer Midway Chicago. The game was a third person action title that used mind powers (telekinesis, etc.) in conjunction with the typical shooter hardware; it was fantastic, the pacing was perfect, the controls were spot on and the difficulty perfectly balanced. Since Psi-Ops Midway Chicago has been relatively silent, working away on Stranglehold, a game that was to serve as the sequel to John Woo’s early 1990’s film Hard Boiled. Of course Midway Chicago was forced to leave the psychic area for the title, instead switching their physics engine to processing the flying debris that characterizes a Woo film.
Last week I received Stranglehold in the mail from Gamefly and this weekend I plopped it in for a trial run. Unfortunately, the disc was incredibly scratched and I wasn’t able to continue on past the second level, but I thought I’d give you all my thoughts as I began to play through.
-There’s too much going on for the camera/controls. You never feel as if you’re in control of the game as much as you feel like you’re kind of directing Chow Yun Fat’s doppelganger in a vague direction.
-Automatically sliding over every inch of the environment is irritating, it forces you to go hog wild and removes any sense of strategy from the game.
-You can’t walk around on ledges for some inexplicable reason; barely a nudge sends you falling off.
-Any scene in hallways is unplayable; the camera doesn’t let you see where you’re going so the only recourse offered is to just push ahead against a wall until you reach the exit.
-The bosses are really nothing but damage sponges, as long as you can keep the Tequila Time flowing and bullets flying they’ll go down quite easily.
-The developers try to do a good job of leading you to your objectives, instead of obtrusive arrows you actually look around the environment for directional clues. However the camera proves quite the inhibitor to looking around, so I often found myself just stumbling about until I found the next goal.
And those were my thoughts upon completing the first level. Then I reached level number two, and suddenly I realized I was having fun. Everything that I had earlier found sloppy (the camera, automatic sliding and the controls) suddenly became perfectly smooth (the confined camera of the first level doesn’t go away per-se, but the second level is much more open so it’s not exactly a problem,) allowing me to actually feel in control of my character as I ran up downed telephone poles, shooting struts and send a group of pirates flailing in an excessive display of Havok Physics. This second level just continues to get better and better, giving you more and more guns and environments to play around with (one flaw: the objectives are super repetitive in this level) until you finally get to take flight in a Hong Kong Police Department helicopter and take on even more pirates from behind a mounted M60E2.
From a graphical standpoint, Stranglehold is quite good, but not great. The Unreal Engine 3 does a fine job rendering the (aforementioned) bevy of particles sent flying and there is some really good attention to detail (it’s always really cool to notice little things like seeing the main character grimace as he’s shot,) but I found that overall, the visuals left a little it to be desired.
Thanks to a badly damaged disc that’s where my play through ended; the game wasn’t great, but as a quick diversion you could do a lot worse.
