Forum Overview :: Stranglehold :: Really short, but if you think you're going to replay the piss out of it, buy it

[quote name="Worm"]In retrospect the entire thing is about the length of a John Woo movie, which makes perfect sense. However, we all know what problems I have with sense. It seems like they could have edged out the game with some playable scenes from Hardboiled. One scene in Hardboiled, that would fit seemlessly into Stranglehold's Standoff mechanic, has Tequila holding a baby trying to keep it from crying, while plugging people who pop out with their guns pointed at him. They could have even just put the entire movie into the game, done the dialog as cutscenes, and some of the other parts as a kind of puzzle sequence. The second level of the game in some parts will seem like it was made to display the issues with the camera, and movement mechanics. Tequila cannot make a normal jump or climb over things, so if you need to move from point A to point B you have to dive. However, it's all made up when they put you in a helicopter with a mounted gun and let you go nuts. The game definitely plays a few gold stars above Max Payne, and the boss fights aren't half as bad. Once you get past needing to put four hundred bullets into a guy's face, it's all pretty easy to cognitize. One of the fights boils down to MP1's "Guy with a better gun and better health" formula, but after that they're pretty enjoyable patterned affairs. I really enjoyed sliding/diving/swinging and unloading on enemies. The entire game feels really cool, especially the cinematic you get when you use the barrage move, where Tequila is soaked in blood with bullets whizzing past him, reloading his shotgun for once, to make it shoot like the Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament. There are some definitely questionable design choices throughout the game. The shotgun only ever has 12 shells, where the SMG, Assault Rifle, and Heavy Machine Gun all have around 100 or 200 bullets. So you'll use it, but not for long if the enemies aren't carying them. So often a normal mook will show up who takes twice as many bullets to kill, this is pretty frustrating. They appear in half of the game's stages, and become the standard enemy for a large amount of one. However, they do get their own entrance cinematic(except in one stage), which I guess should have been warning enough. I was really suprised by how short the game was, but it's all action(except for when you can't find the stairs in Hong Kong Revisited). The game still would have benefitted from some more stuff, a survival mode, reverse circuit stages, single palyer coustumes, anything really. It's a pretty great game, and a shame they didn't lengthen it out at all. [/quote]