Kiss me, Hold me, Strangle me
Stranglehold is without a doubt one of the best adaptations of Space Invaders I have ever played. Beyond the John Woo licensing, the gameplay has changed little with the same cover-shoot-onslaught mentality but with added touches such as smart-bombs, rapid fire and precision shooting. Its high-definition, time-dilating, dual-pistol wielding veneer aside, Stranglehold is as much a retro shooter as Cheesy Invaders was before it.
Soaked in machismo it picks up where Max Payne left off with a brainless, melodramatic premise. Stranglehold taps into an oft neglected sense of fun; stripped of everything unnecessary, the protagonist, “Tequila”, is as tough and armed in the first hour as he is in the last. Special powers are unlocked swiftly and the game rapidly leaves you to get on with the business of shooting everything that moves and making things move by shooting them. Cover disappears as quickly as your ammunition and only the most stalwart of support pillars will aid you with the otherwise twitchy cover system. The harder difficulties and later levels produce ne’er-do-wells who resist bullets with teflon aplomb while the odd UFO provides arena style battles.
Your first two hours of Stranglehold will likely be filled with the kind of wide-eyed, enthusiastic glee reserved for fireworks and cabaret while the mid and end-game will be a careful, rinse and repeat progression pocked with explosions and vectored distortions, tinged in the sepia of Tequila-time. Rarely does the game execute you for no reason and set-piece success comes from planning and management of enemies and specials; unfortunately the game rewards you for finding dead-zones in the clockwork enemies: the butter-zone where antagonists line up for your special brand of justice, rather than remunerate you for creative and skilled play. You are brutally exposed from behind or up close and even the nose-breaking melee move is tricky and rife with the possibility of a swift demise.
The cut-scenes are wonderfully animate and reveal the pedigree of their production and, for once, blissfully easy to bypass if any of that pesky plot is obstructing your path to the killing fields. The environs never feel anything less than spectacular and asset duplication is all but non-existent. Perhaps because of its visual finesse, slow-down (of the unintended variety) is all the more pronounced, especially in the later sections; perhaps a rush optimisation job to reach the pre-Halo 3 release date.
Stranglehold is brilliant at what it does and manages to keep a sense of humour and sense of fun while doing it. The John Woo collaboration is perhaps overrated given such excellent core gameplay but for once, the license perhaps adds something to the game that it could otherwise only allude to: style.
