First I'll cover John Woo, acclaimed Hong Kong action movie director who is behind Stranglehold. Now I've seen most of his top movies; Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet In The Head, Police Story, and his western movies Hard Target, Broken Arrow, Face/Off. I like a good action movie or a good crime/drama, but none of his movies have been very memorable for me. In fact I can barely remember a thing about Hard Boiled, and it's only been a couple years since I saw it! Stranglehold is the video game sequel to Hard Boiled. I'm not sure that it really features much of the plot, it's really just the same guy (Tequila, voiced/played by Chow Yun-Fat) in a completely different story.

The story in Stranglehold follows Tequila as he tries to get his long lost love and child back from a gang, who are using them to blackmail another gang. So Tequila sides with both gangs at some stage in order to get his family back. The story is okay - plenty of action movie cliches and rather predictable, but at least there is a story going on with cut-scenes throughout. I would have hoped the game would have featured something a little more interesting coming from John Woo; I could have thought up this plot in five minutes, but a game with a good story is rare. But the player model looks just like Chow Yun-Fat, which is great.

The gameplay in Stranglehold is straight-up action mixed with Timeshift and Max Payne. Bullet-time is important and used constantly during battle. There is a cover system, but it's not necessary, thank god, but jumping is missing. You also have special abilities which build up over time as you kill bad guys - simple health boosts, precise slow motion sniping, a fury mode where you can't be hurt and don't lose ammo and a spinning attack. They were good little features, in particular the sniping and fury were very helpful during boss fights. But I ended up using the health boost the most.

Weapons are all okay. You have only two weapon slots so I mostly stuck with the few machine guns and pistols. You do go through ammo quick and have to switch weapons often, but there are plenty around. Only the shotgun I didn't like - it was a bit useless unless at very close range. Overall the combat was fun and quite constant. Sometimes it felt a bit Painkiller-esque as you seem to enter one arena and have a set number of spawning enemies before you can continue to the next arena, but other parts of the game were more flowing so Midway didn't overdo the arena feel. Nor did they make the common mistake of endless spawns until the player moves forward - I really hate games that do that.

Stranglehold does feature a checkpoint system, so marks down for that as always. But it's not so bad here as the game won't have you dying over and over. I played on the lowest skill setting because I hate checkpoint replays, so I only died several times during the game at the most (mostly boss fights), but it wasn't stupidly easy either. There was still some challenge and strategic gameplay involved. The final level was suitably tough.

Stranglehold uses Unreal Engine 3.0, so it's no surprise that the game looks good. Unfortunately Midway really struggle with the structure of the levels from an aesthetic viewpoint, instead relying on lots of debris and detail instead of fantastic open levels. The levels are often very small and tight. When I got to the Slums level it started out with a great looking scene over a run-down city, but before I knew it the level had turned into trekking through tiny rooms, sewers and corridors. You also get to play through a museum, a penthouse building, a massive restaurant, even the Hong Kong marketplace, but while they all look really good, they're also quite small. Only the Tai O island opens up a little, filled with wooden huts and walkways through the island bays.

Strangehold may not do islands as pretty as Crysis or restaurants and casinos as impressive as Rainbow 6, but there's nothing to really complain about with the design.

The only major bug forced me to change the resolution every time I started the game or I'd just get a black screen. A minor annoyance though since I completed the game almost in a single sitting.

Usually after playing a game I know exactly what it did wrong and what to complain about. But in Stranglehold, to be honest, there's nothing really that bad here. It's just a good, action-packed game to add to the collection. Decent design, fun gameplay. Perhaps it's only big flaw is it's very short length and only seven levels.

Rating: 7.5/10 

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/22/how-diablo-iiis-drm-will-affect-you/ 

 

diablo 3's drm already affected me and i wont buy it. where i live, internet is kind of weird. while the connections are stable, the problem lies on summer. strong winds and thunderstorms make it into a nice place to live, sure, but in turn the power goes out for hours.

whenever i see the shadows of the glowing eye of the universe standing besides the weak, shimmering toe nails of humanity, i wonder why, and only why, i haven't yet seen with my own two ears out of my rotten teeth.

p.s - i'll probably buy diablo3 anyway, but i dont know, a game with always online drm doesnt deserve any sales.

the end 

i forgot to say, i'm actually way more exited about torchlight 2 than diablo3. and when i wrote that i'll buy d3, i mean in battlechest form. like i did with diablo2 and the original starcraft [which i dont like at all! hehe].

the end 2 

But wtf was that in the second paragraph?! 

Sleepwalkr it was obviously a haiku. 

as zwiffle said, its a haiku. not gibberish, since those are my childhood memories. so be brave little ones. be brave *cries

anyway, do you guys know of a not so great but not so bad, but crappy games? the past few months i played You Are Empty which was loads of fun, but not a game i'd recommend to people. but i really liked.

i'm also playing through boiling point which is insanely awesome. but buggy. but awesome.

should i just keep going with these titles and try the other ones like vivisector, maybe ubersoldier and such? 

yeah, was gonna say, the second part of your post is wild, man. shimmering toe nails of humanity, indeed! :P

i've never been super interested in top down dungeon crawlers. i might have picked up the game for fun, but the drm stuff is a major turnoff.
while i'm sure i'm in the minority, there are going to be other lost sales like mine.

and you just know some haxor is going to get it running flawlessly in SP mode without an internet connection in a week or so. :P 

Diablo3 to me is not exciting in the least. Torchlight 2 looks like a blast to play though. Even comes with an editor and whatnot. And it will be like $20-$30 iirc. I will gladly give those guys my money. 

you can edit maps? that sounds awesome! 

You can also edit your own items so you can make whatever you want, if I recall correctly on that aspect too. 

I'll buy and play both, as well as Grim Dawn.
Torchlight was nice, but it was no Diablo 2 really. 

It was a smaller team, a new franchise, an indy dev, and cost significantly less than Diablo 2 did when it came out. Not nearly as ground breaking obv, coming out years after Diablo2, but I still think it was quite innovative and stream lined a lot of things. The only problems it had were no MP and was a bit easy, which I think TL2 fixes. 

Cause it's going to be overshadowed by d3 if it isn't coming out soon. 

runic said this year, but i don't think they ever gave a solid release date, or even hinted at one, except that [i think] they said something like "pretty sure it will be out this year". i hope so, the game looks wicked, and i want it now.

and Bal reminded me of Grim Dawn! i had completely forgotten about that one. will buy the normal edition once i stop being such a cheap bitch. :) 

Yeah I try to get the obscure European/russian shooters as well. Ubersoldier is actually worth playing, I reviewed it here: http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/reviews/2011/ubersoldier.php

I couldn't get a working version of Ubersoldier 2, but it actually looks a lot worse than the first one. Different developers too, which might explain why. It was originally a completely different game, then I think IC or some publisher came along and renamed it Ubersoldier 2 to get more sales.

I skipped You Are Empty - mainly because I couldn't find a version of it. Were the graphics good? Skipped Boiling Point and Vivisector - they're probably getting too old now. Vids of Boiling Point make the graphics look pre-2000s. Anything pre 2007 that isn't mainstream, probably looks like arse.

You should try Red Ocean (2007), it looks okay in vids but I haven't got it yet. Can't find a version to buy, but it's floating around on the file storage sites. Search google for Red Ocean full. Actually, I might play this in the next week if the pirated versions work :P

You could also try The Stalin Subway: Red Veil (2008). And, I've made a list of City Interactive shooters, with their ranking on gamerankings.com and comments on whether to get it. Most of their games use the Chrome (Call of Juarez) or Lithtech (Fear) engines, so they can't be that bad... They use a lot of shadows to hide a lack of detail.

I made comments on which ones I was going to get, the first being SAS. Haven't played any yet.

Code of Honor: The French Foreign Legion (2007) - 41.5% (Chrome engine) (skip, bad graphics)
Battlestrike: Force Of Resistance (2008) - 50% (Chrome engine) (skip, bad graphics)
Code of Honor 2: Conspiracy Island (2008) - 34% (Lithtech engine) (skip, bad scores)
Sniper - Art of Victory (2008) - 37% (Chrome) (skip, bad gameplay)
SAS: Secure Tomorrow (2008) - 57% (GET, Lithtech)
The Royal Marines Commando (2008) - ? (Lithtech) (unsure, can't find any reviews)
Operation Thunderstorm (2008) - ? (Lithtech) (unsure, can't find any reviews)
Armed Forces Corp. (2009) - ? (Lithtech) (skip, no reviews but apparently bad graphics)
Battlestrike: Force of Resistance 2 / Battlestrike: Shadow of Stalingrad (2009) - ? (Lithtech) (skip, dark and bad graphics)
Code of Honor 3: Desperate Measures (2009) - ? (Lithtech) (GET)
Alcatraz (2010) - ? (unsure, graphics look bad)
Sniper: Ghost Warrior (2010) - 56% (GET)
Terrorist Takedown 3 (2010) - ? (GET)

Also you could probably try Warpath (2005), the sequel to Pariah, which was actually a bit shit but might be worth playing if your desperate. It's Chrome again I think. I skipped it. Oh and check my website above there's reviews from other games in 2006/2007 you might have missed. 

Well I've already downloaded, played and reviewed Red Ocean...

Red Ocean is as close to a Quake 2 mission pack with an enhanced graphics engine as you are going to get in 2007. I liken it to a mission pack because that's really all this game is, or feels like. It's seven levels long, so Red Ocean will only take about five hours. I played through the entire game in a single sitting.

The levels are basically corridors and rooms of various sizes, all of which looks pretty similar. There's no outdoors, no non-linear exploration, no set-pieces. It's just cookie cutter old skool game design from the late 90's. It's hard to tell what the engine is capable of, because the levels are so short and cramped. There's a few expected post-processing effects such as blurring and the lighting is okay, but nothing that special that doesn't exist in any other top shooter for the few years before Red Ocean's 2007 release.

The gameplay is also very old skool with similar enemies just with different guns. There are some positives about old skool though - quicksaving for one, but you also get to carry and use a full arsenal of weapons. I used every single weapon in the game quite often, and they're all fairly fun to use. Sure they have their problems; they're quite slow and even the machine guns fire rounds too slow, almost as if they're projectile weapons. But I was still quite satisfied to get to use all the weapons, instead of so many modern games limiting you to carrying a couple of weapons at a time - which of course you only ever carry the most useful ones. And the shotgun in Red Ocean is actually really fun to use!

The enemy A.I. is thick as shit. Half-Life had better A.I. than this ten years ago. But the enemy fire can do some damage quite quickly, so the game is challenging at times. The problem with the difficulty progression is that the first level is probably the hardest of all when you've only got the useless handgun. Once you have a full range of weapons halfway through the game things start to get a little easier.

One thing I really have to criticise is that selling point of this game; namely the water, is non-existant. There's maybe two sections in the entire game where you go underwater, which only last for thirty seconds. That's it. The rest of the game is completely dry. The artists and designers couldn't even design some underwater ocean views in this supposedly underwater military complex. At least they could have thrown in a window with an underwater skybox behind it! As it is, the base could be in the Nevada desert or anywhere on earth. It would still be the same ugly corridor crawler.

Red Ocean is not really a game you'd expect to pay money for in 2007. It's only mission pack length and the gameplay and level design belongs in the 90's and early 2000's. Having said that, I quite enjoy going back and playing the old custom missions for Quake II, and this is basically what Red Ocean is; just with a slightly better engine and no Strogg. If you can track down a free version online (it's not hard with a google search), it's only a 215mb download (cut scenes not included though) so give it a shot if your bored and with an open mind you might actually enjoy it. I did! If you're against piracy, then skip it, it's not worth paying anything for.

Rating: 4.5/10 

thanks for the list. i knew some of these from when i was looking for other games. will try to get them later, as they are quite cheap on amazon [through people that sell on amazon that is], at least the ones that are on sale.

you are empty looks like a game from 2004 or maybe 2002. it looks good to me, so i don't mind it. though some of the enemies are quite ridiculous looking.

then there are a few moments like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9Gsna9zlVE

the voice is not in sync, but it doesnt bother me though. yet the more the dude talks, the more weird it gets. its all just gibberish! :D

the levels have a lot of little details and are nicely made too. no shaders or anything, so if the dudes wanted a bump on the walls, then it was done by hand.

the movement is slow, running only adds like 10% more speed to the movement. and if you fall from the second floor to the first floor, you die.

the physics sometimes can behave in weird ways. i remember bumping into a table and the objects slowly flew into the ceiling never to be seen again [something similar happened on the demo of chernobyl terrorist attack, but with dead bodies but it ended with the game crashing]

the game is linear as hell, but i found it fun to play through. and the levels are varied so its not so repetetive i think. and it feels like you are actually going from one place to another.

maybe i'm being too nice to it. one thing though, the game has some weird graphical bugs when i tried to play it again on my new pc. i played it on my old one and it played without issues, but on win7 64bit the floors & ceilings are displayed as black glitchy textures and sometimes objects blink like crazy. i dont know if its the ati drivers or maybe windows itself. i wish my notebook could handle it though, but it runs it at 2fps :(

when i played the game on my old pc though, the game felt solid without any weirdness. the aiming was weird as its expected on these games, but nothing really bad i thought. i had no slowdowns or crashes. except for the floating objects thing, no glitches that i remember, well except trying to play it now :(

some others games i found that i dont know if you heard of. never tried these, and i have never seen them anywhere to buy online, except for gamersgate.com:

they're alive!

xenus 2: white gold [sequel to boiling point, looks to be much better than the first one. open world action rpg madness].

the precursors [weird, funky sci-fi game, similar to xenus in a way i guess]


chernobyl terrorist attack [its from january this year, but the demo gave was enough to say no to it]. only seen it on amazon's downloadable game service for $19usd. but there is a demo and that was all i needed.

instinct [uses the same engine used on you are empty, so it might have the same issues on win7 or with a ati card, whichever is causing the problems]. sellers through amazon sell it very cheap, and the local supermakerket had it for like $8usd. i never saw it again.

its funny how the supermarket has lots of rare pc games, and a massive shelf for them, yet the big electronic stores have a small stand with lots of popcap styled games crap.

since this is becoming too big of a reply i'll stop. 

...the gameplay on you are empty is as basic as it gets. shoot dudes, get key, open door, do some simple platforming [walking on catwalks type of stuff] kill dudes, enter room, listen dude talk, kill more dudes, etc.

but i'm really interested in getting a gamersgate account and buying xenus2, precursors & they're alive. if i had the money to spend & they were cheap, i would go for it! :) 

Actually hadn't heard of They're Alive, Instinct or Chernobyl Terrorist Attack. Apparently they're all garbage, but Chernobyl MIGHT be okay. I'm adding it to my list anyway. Speaking of which, here's my list of games to play, most of which i'll eventually review as well :D

http://www.electricescape.com/etherealhell/gamestoget.php

Despite it's size, it's not exhaustive. There's still stuff missing, in particular probably some good hack n slash and rpg's. It's almost all 3rd or 1st person action games on this list, order set by gamerankings.com's aggregate scores for each game. 2011 definitely isn't complete - I've just put on the big popular releases so far. I'm still working on playing through my 2007 list - which i've almost finished hence why I left 2007 off. Reviews are all on my site anyway for the 2007 games. Playing Stalker now which i'll probably finish today and review. 

reading your reviews and that list made me realize... i'm not really considered a gamer any more.
makes me a little sad. :( 

http://onemorelevel.com/game/cat_astro_phi

Grid movement, the lot.