Stranglehold (PC)
Killing is 42-percent more fun in slow-motion.
2/18/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2
What's Hot: Slow-motion explosions; Woo-style standoffs; First-ever game to allow belly-flopping on room service carts while still firing at enemies
What's Not: Crap camera; Dull mission objectives (blowing up meth tables? really?); Half-baked multiplayer; Steep hardware requirements (2 GBs of RAM, Dual Core, etc.)
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
These moments were consistently exciting, and worked well to break up the monotony of the game. If anything, we wouldn't have minded a few more Standoffs in the game.
Stranglehold's gameplay on the PC is nearly identical to what you'll find on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game. Unfortunately, the game's hardware requirements are fairly substantial on the PC. And you won't get any of those mysteriously seductive Achievement Points for playing
Stranglehold on the PC, as you would on the 360 version, or a copy of 'Hard Boiled' in its entirety, as you would on the Collector's Edition of the PS3 version.
The concept of a third-person action game that has us "tricking" our way
à la Tony Hawk's Pro Skater through waves of bad guys is interesting in theory. But in practice, it falls short of the mark.
For every awesome diving-backwards-while-jacking-up-people moment the game offers, there is a stumble-trip-I-didn't-mean-to-do-that-why-isn't-Tequila-Time-working-aiiiieeeeee-now-I'm-dead? moment. In the end,
Stranglehold's Inspector Tequila suffers from a chronic case of Lara Croft Syndrome: He's elegant and nimble, doing all of these wonderful moves, and then, seconds later, he seems to be tripping over his own shoelaces.
That's a shame, because
Stranglehold probably has more potential than any other release this year. Sliding to a halt across a tea house floor while shooting at the shins out from under a bad guy, then rolling over and peppering a second henchman in the chest -- it was in this moments that the game made us feel like Chow Yun Fat starring in a John Woo movie; it showed us, in these moments, the kind of potential it has.
But then the camera would get stuck behind a wall, someone started firing at us from off-screen, and suddenly, we were lying on the floor, dead, realizing that we are not Chow Yun Fat. We are not starring in a John Woo movie. We were back to being a bunch of jackasses, sitting around a gaming console, who dared, for a moment, to dream a little dream.
This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.
