Stranglehold Demo

After an excruciating 1.3 GB download last night, I spent the scant few minutes before needing to be in bed, having past the "should be in bed" point by nearly an hour, with the John Woo 'presented' Third Person Shooter, Stranglehold, based on the continuing adventures of the lead character in the modern classic, Hard Boiled.

I've said before that a console shooter really has to work hard to make me care. The diversity of control on a PC makes the basically simple premise of a first or third person shooter feel a little too shallow and clumsy on a console. Proponents argue that reliance on the console controller introduces a higher degree of challenge and strategy to the mechanic. There is a boon, they suggest, to the inability of the opponent to simply whirl around double jump off a wall and pop you down instantly with a rail gun shot to the face, denigrating the game play as "twitchy." In this argument all I hear is "waah waah my reaction time sucks and I get owned!"

Not that all FPS games should be lightening fast frag fests but let's not pretend that slowing the competition down creates a superior environment. A different environment, yes, but that's it. It's just something different. Nor does it necessarily make it more strategic. There's something to be said for strategy in an FPS, but Halo isn't it.

I'm rambling. Where was I? Console FPS games, right. Generally I have no interest. It takes a special play mechanic to get me interested.

Stranglehold delivers. It's not an FPS game, and really doesn't even feel like much of a shooter in general due to the emphasis being placed less on the shooting and more on the movement of the player. Certainly the gunplay is an important part of the dynamic, but it is far from the whole. As important as your ability to aim and shoot is the players ability to negotiate the various urban environment obstacles that clutter the game's landscape. Sliding across table tops, diving through the air from around corners, sliding down banisters and riding on dining carts kicks you automatically into a bullet-time (called Tequila Time after the protagonist) slow down transforming difficult to impossible kills into manageable shots, while simultaneously creating around the player the feel of a Hong Kong action flick. This game has a style all it's own.

Now I may be biased on console shooters, I'll give you that. I once turned to my friend in college in the middle of a round of Quake II mod LMCTF and said that what I really needed was a girl who appreciated the aesthetic value of a quad damage rocket gib (luckily for me six years later I found one, and life is now quite perfect). But it's not that I find no value in console shooters, it's that historically, I've found them ill-suited to the control and wanted something a little different that took advantage of the differences in setting and interface. Gears of War did, though it was sort of on the cusp. Stranglehold does it in spades. It doesn't feel like a PC game trying to sell itself to the console market. It feels like a console game. And for a shooter, I can't give it any higher praise than that.