"John Woo Presents Stranglehold, developed by Tiger Hill and published by Midway, has a lot of expectation to live up to. Tiger Hill is a unique studio – created in 2003 by John Woo and Terence Chang, Tiger Hill seeks to bring existing video game worlds into the world of action cinema, and to bring the world of action cinema into video games in a unique cross pollination. Strangehold is the video game sequel to John Woo’s arguably best Hong Kong action film, Hardboiled, and brings back Police Inspector Tequila Yuen, played by Chow Yun Fat, directed and shot by John Woo, and controlled by you, the player, in what is essentially a ten-hour Hong Kong action movie with the classic plot, action, gunfights, drama, betrayals and downfall that any action fan would expect from a John Woo film."
Overall: Stranglehold is the video game continuation of John Woo's cl@!%#*!ic fast action movie: "Hard Boiled" starring Chow Yun Fat.
Stranglehold is John Woo's vision of his style of action movies converted to video game format.
John Woo has inspired many action movies like "The Matrix" and has introduced the concept of "Bullet-time" slow motion video into games such as Max Payne.
Director/Producer John Woo's style of weapon oriented action movies represent a sort of onscreen ballet of violence. Characters wielding two guns at once, very choreographed stylish movements, liberal use of slow motion and spiraling camera angles. It was only a matter of time before the full vision of John Woo's stories and his pursuit of personifying the action movie genre would be fully realized as a video game.
You play as the character Police Detective John Tequila, as portrayed by the actor Chow Yun Fat. John Tequila, much like he was in the movie "Hard Boiled" is a maverick detective. He has a strong sense of duty and honor, but he's willing to break the rules and disregard orders to get the mission done.
To best personify who John Tequila really is, there is a line in which the police superintendent admonishes John for going into a situation alone, and John merely replies "I was not alone, I had my two friends with me," as he pats his two signature Berreta 92F pistols.
Stranglehold begins with the investigation of a mission Hong Kong policeman. As the story continues, Detective Tequila takes the matters personally and the further he fights his way through the case, the deeper he goes he himself finds himself in a stranglehold between life, his family and the crime syndicate he's pursuing.
Gameplay: This is John Woo's vision of a game, therefore you are thrust into the game as if on the set of one his movies. You are expected to create as much damage as possible to everything around you right off the bat. Very little is out of bounds even if that means shooting a large sign fixture until it drops on top of one of your enemies thusly killing him, then by all means do so.
The environment around you is either partially destructible or somehow can be used by you during gameplay. Whether be by taking cover behind something or being able to easily use environmental items to do some very stylish maneuvers. I'm talking about jumping on a grocery cart and body surfing it across a room and shooting at people in slow motion with a gun in each hand.
Or how about sliding under a table and kicking the table up to use as cover? Looks familiar?
Because things like that are what made John Woo popular. You are awarded for creativity during battle. Sliding across tables shooting, jumping backwards and sliding backwards on your back while shooting, diving and shooting, kicking off of walls while shooting are just a few activities you are expected to do.
So you are awarded for destructiveness and your general ability for @!%#*! kickery. You are awarded with Tequila Bombs. These bombs are special moves that can be pulled off when you have satisfactorily maintained a special meter that measures your scale of action. In general, the more outrageous you get the more you can do and more often it can happen.
You are awarded with the ability to heal yourself partially initially. As time goes on you awarded with the other bombs such as the precision shot. Activating the precision shot stops the game play for brief second allowing you to aim exactly where you want at a distance. Once your selection is made, John pulls a snap shot and you are awarded with a camera-following-bullet view as it strikes whoever it was you aimed at. Where you aim cues certain animations, shooting somebody in the groin, in the eye and so forth.
One of my personal favorites is the "Barrage Mode." Activation the barrage treats you to a animation sequence of John Tequila with Chow Yun Fat's near signature smirk on his face, reloading his gun and for a brief moment in time the game slows down, you become immune to damage and you have unlimited ammunition and your gun fires in continuous streams of death . Use this wisely, but trust me you won't be disappointed when you get a shotgun and do a barrage with it.
Stranglehold does offer an interesting sequence that occurs when you get surrounded called "standoff". It's very similar to Army of Two's back to back mode. The game goes into slow motion and the screen rotates around giving you a few seconds to engage the closest enemy. They fire back but you can use that time to dodge the bullets with a small movement of your body like what you saw in "The Matrix." Bullet trails included. Graphics: Though the graphics are very good and the representations of Chow Yun Fat and even John Woo who makes a cameo in the game are outstanding, there are some minor graphic flaws. There are some minor clipping issues with character protrusions going through the game map elements. Sometimes walls disappear and reappear and occasionally the mission maps seem very repetitive.
Though nothing wrong with the missions, it's just that sometimes I began to wonder if I'm ever going to look at something different than what I've been looking at for the past 10 minutes.
A nice touch is that John bleeds when he's injured. The more hurt he gets, the bloodier he gets. Which looks really cool during that infamous barrage weapon loading scene if you've been shot up a bit.
The slow motion views are represented well and done convincingly. The reddish haze over the camera sometimes obscures brightly colored elements that may be important, but you can turn off slow motion and turn it on at will with a press of a button. Sound: You can't go wrong here. The voices are the voices of the real characters, the audio is in sync with people's mouths and of course, the guns sound like guns which is really all you need.
The sound track to this game is essentially you shooting everybody all the time with a great many bullets. All other sounds are nonessential.
To Suggestions: To be honest, the multiplayer over Xbox Live could be completely avoided. Sure it could be fun, but with so many great online games like Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War, it's hard to compare. I'll be honest, I never played Stranglehold online because I never saw the need to. I absolutely love this game, but it's just one of those games that I just don't feel compelled to play because i have other great games to play online.
Since we're suggesting things here, I'd suggest a sequel but done with a co-op mode.
Made in Canada