Goddamn it, Stranglehold! You're a renegade cop, but you get the job done!
What a strange game. Less in terms of gameplay or subject matter, but in the fact that this has a legacy. There's just something about Stranglehold that made people gravitate to it for one reason or another. I remember this thing consistently placing on those turn-of-the-decade top ten lists; all of those early YouTube videos where they loop trailer footage in the background while talking at length about their favorite hidden, budget-friendly gems that everyone needs to try. Things were different in a pre-Xbox Live Arcade world, I suppose. Pulling this out of the Walmart bargain bin for ten bucks probably would have felt like the steal it was back in 2007. That is much less the case today.
GOG proudly advertises that this runs on Windows 10. This is a lie. Well, it runs, but it runs badly. The game consistently, quietly died behind a loading screen every single time I tried getting into Chapter 2 until I installed GOG Galaxy. Playing it through that got me all the way to the true final boss, Lok. Lok is some random henchman with a life bar and an MG42. Lok should be pretty trivial to beat, and I imagine that's the case for the console players. The problem with Lok is that his arena is completely destructible, and there's nothing that Lok loves more than using his gun as the bullet hose that it is. These things together aren't a problem until you realize that the game can't de-render all of the broken scenery fast enough, and it panics and kills the process once it has too much debris to keep track of. I think that's what's happening, at least. I downloaded a 100% save file off of a sketchy website to try to skip over it, but that somehow didn't end up unlocking anything. This marks Stranglehold as the first game I've seen that can arbitrarily decide to ignore your new save file even with the old one gone and cloud syncing disabled. I've also seen zero people complaining about these problems and thus zero people suggesting any fixes, which suggests to me that my computer might be haunted.
That said, I don't feel like I've missed out on all that much by being forced to stop at the end of Chapter 3. Mechanically, it's a less interesting, clunkier Max Payne. That's definitely not a bad game to be inspired by (especially since Max Payne was itself pulling from John Woo's filmography), but it's just nowhere near as fun or as visceral as the first two Max Payne games were. And half a decade prior to Stranglehold, to boot! "Blow up 14 meth labs to proceed"? Give me a break. Let me walk forward and shoot people! Hell, give me another five minute turret section if you really want to shake things up. The heavy-on-the-sepia, bloomy filter when you activate the fittingly-named Tequila Time looks less cool and more like I'm wearing beer goggles. The game's got a personality, which is more than you can say for most of what came out during the seventh generation, but it's nowhere near enough to salvage what's ultimately a pretty middling experience.
It would have been smarter to emulate this. RPCS3 can probably squeeze more stability out of Stranglehold than the PC port proper can muster, and at least that one comes with a copy of Hard Boiled.
What a strange game. Less in terms of gameplay or subject matter, but in the fact that this has a legacy. There's just something about Stranglehold that made people gravitate to it for one reason or another. I remember this thing consistently placing on those turn-of-the-decade top ten lists; all of those early YouTube videos where they loop trailer footage in the background while talking at length about their favorite hidden, budget-friendly gems that everyone needs to try. Things were different in a pre-Xbox Live Arcade world, I suppose. Pulling this out of the Walmart bargain bin for ten bucks probably would have felt like the steal it was back in 2007. That is much less the case today.
GOG proudly advertises that this runs on Windows 10. This is a lie. Well, it runs, but it runs badly. The game consistently, quietly died behind a loading screen every single time I tried getting into Chapter 2 until I installed GOG Galaxy. Playing it through that got me all the way to the true final boss, Lok. Lok is some random henchman with a life bar and an MG42. Lok should be pretty trivial to beat, and I imagine that's the case for the console players. The problem with Lok is that his arena is completely destructible, and there's nothing that Lok loves more than using his gun as the bullet hose that it is. These things together aren't a problem until you realize that the game can't de-render all of the broken scenery fast enough, and it panics and kills the process once it has too much debris to keep track of. I think that's what's happening, at least. I downloaded a 100% save file off of a sketchy website to try to skip over it, but that somehow didn't end up unlocking anything. This marks Stranglehold as the first game I've seen that can arbitrarily decide to ignore your new save file even with the old one gone and cloud syncing disabled. I've also seen zero people complaining about these problems and thus zero people suggesting any fixes, which suggests to me that my computer might be haunted.
That said, I don't feel like I've missed out on all that much by being forced to stop at the end of Chapter 3. Mechanically, it's a less interesting, clunkier Max Payne. That's definitely not a bad game to be inspired by (especially since Max Payne was itself pulling from John Woo's filmography), but it's just nowhere near as fun or as visceral as the first two Max Payne games were. And half a decade prior to Stranglehold, to boot! "Blow up 14 meth labs to proceed"? Give me a break. Let me walk forward and shoot people! Hell, give me another five minute turret section if you really want to shake things up. The heavy-on-the-sepia, bloomy filter when you activate the fittingly-named Tequila Time looks less cool and more like I'm wearing beer goggles. The game's got a personality, which is more than you can say for most of what came out during the seventh generation, but it's nowhere near enough to salvage what's ultimately a pretty middling experience.
It would have been smarter to emulate this. RPCS3 can probably squeeze more stability out of Stranglehold than the PC port proper can muster, and at least that one comes with a copy of Hard Boiled.