Stranglehold

I recently finished playing through Stranglehold. I wanted to like it a lot. It reminded me of Max Payne, in that it was probably the best action movie I played through this year. However, Max Payne was a better game, even with the really annoying dream sequences. For those of you who haven't played it, Max Payne is an awesome shooter that makes you feel like you're playing through an action movie. Except when you're in one of the two dream sequence levels, where the game becomes a bad platformer and is about as much fun as getting a root canal.

Now then, when Stranglehold is good it's awesome. You get to play as hard boiled detective Tequila (voiced and modeled after Chow Yun-Fat). The slow motion effects are great. The game even gives you style points for effective kills. The environment is full of destructible objects, some of which you can use to kill bad guys (for crazy amounts of style points).

It also has more than it's share of bad points.

At it's core, Stranglehold is about killing hordes of bad guys while doing cool stunts. When Stranglehold focuses on that core it's a lot of fun. When it strays from that core it's frustrating and very not fun.

One of the most frustrating levels has trip lasers all over it. What's a trip laser? It's a laser that is attached to an explosive. If you cross one you die. Congratulations, restart the level. It's the first level where you really have to be careful about where you put Tequila. One misstep and boom, yer dead. Up to that point the game has trained you to be mobile. Slide on carts. Slide down banisters. Leap through the air. And then it kills you on the trip laser level.

After a while someone decided that Stranglehold needed to be more like splinter cell, in that you need to be sneaky and inch forward to live. Again, this goes against it's fun core. The level in the ruins towards the end of the game is particularly bad. The game puts you in what looks like it was an urban war zone before you got there. Most of the level looks the same, and the spaces are very confined, so not conducive to crazy cools stunts. It is conducive to having a ton of guys shoot you from cover, however.

Stranglehold also sometimes becomes a "hunt the foozle" game. The bad level here actually comes pretty early. The game drops you off on an island, and you have to hunt down and destroy several drug labs. Several hidden drug labs. In a large area that's hard to get around in, in part because every area looks like every other area.

So when the game is cool, it's very cool. And when you hit some of the more frustrating levels it makes you want to repeatedly punch the designers who are responsible.

If there's a lesson to be learned here it's this: Stick to the fun core. Get rid of anything that doesn't relate directly to the fun core of your game.

A second lesson might be: Chow Yun-Fat greatly raises anything's level of awesome.