Stranglehold is a game with a singular purpose: to recreate a John Woo movie in video game form and it does this very well. It has also aged really well in the last decade and a bit since it’s initial release. The game play itself is still very fun. You have a variety of weapons to wield each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You can utilize a bunch of different environmental triggers in levels to kill enemies such as propane tanks; signs; etc. There are also a few special moves you can do such as precision aim, where you can zoom in to shoot your pistol in slow motion, or barrage where you go into a slow motion god mode where you can’t take damage and have infinite ammo. These abilities come into play mainly in boss or mini boss fights where the enemies have much more health than normal although I found precision aim useful against snipers as well. One thing I will mention about the weapons is that the shotgun is limited to 12 shells which is strangely low. I can have over a hundred rounds for the carbine; 200 rounds for the SMG; and over a hundred for the pistol; etc. I want to complain about the health of the bosses for a second here. I understand that boss fights are supposed to be more difficult but to see the only difference between them and a normal enemy be their massive health bar and doing more damage to you seems lazy. So many games do this as they also make the only difference in difficulty levels be health and damage. I wish more games would make enemies smarter not just bullet sponges. The graphics have held up pretty well as I mentioned. The object detail is pretty poor but the clothing and facial detail are both very good even after all these years.
I played Stranglehold on Linux using Wine. The game never crashed on me. The only bug or glitch I noticed was that some times there were these little stutters that lasted about a second. They didn’t happen often though. There was an option for resolution; and a toggle for dynamic shadows and decals. Alt-Tab works. You can’t change the difficulty mid game but you can change it when choosing to continue the game. The game uses a checkpoint save system. Some save points are spaced out well but others are terrible and can take 20-30 real time minutes between them. You can’t view the controls mid game either, just from the main menu which is a weird design choice. I couldn’t monitor frame rate but the game felt smooth outside of the odd stutter.
Game Engine: Unreal Engine 3
Disk Space Used: 13.5 GB
Game Version Played: 1.1
Settings Used: dynamic shadows and decals on; 1920x1080
GPU Usage: 1-51 %
VRAM Usage: 614-791 MB
CPU Usage: 5-14 %
RAM Usage: 2.4-2.8 GB
Overall the story and game play was very fun and I enjoyed my time with the game. I didn’t like how the boss fights were handled or the save system though. The game is a bit short but it feels right and doesn’t feel dragged out or rushed. I finished the game on normal difficulty in 5 hours and 10 minutes.
My Score: 7.5/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.2.6 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB || Linux Mint 20.3 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.4.0-100-generic | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz | Wine 7.3 | DXVK v1.9.4L-2