Stranglehold - Review

Added September 19th, 2007 by Artie Augustyn

Stranglehold is the result of the combined effort of well-known action director, John Woo, and the game studio Tiger Hill Entertainment. The game serves as a sequel off the 1992 John Woo classic action film "Hard Boiled". Stranglehold is primarily an action game, with some puzzle solving elements placed in minor sections of the game. The action genre has unfortunately been vacant for the past few years. If you haven't noticed, a game like Stranglehold hasn't been released since "The Path of Neo" two years ago. Not much has evolved for this genre. If you're an action junkie waiting to get your fix, this is the game for you.

You play as Inspector Tequila (voiced by Chow Yun-Fat, the star of the film Hard Boiled), a no worries cop from Hong Kong. News breaks out that a cop was killed in the city.  In order to find out the entire story, you make your way to the police station. When you arrive, your chief is in the middle of a phone call with a mysterious gang, asking for one cop to go to the market section of town. You, being the hard-ass cop that you are, decide to go in alone despite your chief's concerns. From here the game picks up rather quickly.  There are no tutorials explaining how to play the game or any long cut scenes giving you a background and introduction to any of the characters. You'll learn rather quickly how the game works -- you have guns, you shoot people. Right trigger to shoot, A to switch guns, and the Left Trigger for interacting with any part of the environment. You'll be using the latter one most often.

Interacting with the environment can include anything from diving through the air, jumping off a wall, rolling down a cart, hanging on a lamp, to sliding down rails. They all sound spiffy and actually have some use to them besides looking very cool and giving the game a great "Action Movie" feel. The main reason you'll want to use these stunts is to activate "Tequila Time" which is exactly like Bullet Time from games such as Max Payne or Enter the Matrix. While in Tequila Time you execute more damage to enemies and take less damage yourself. The other reason to use these stunts is to gain Style Points. Depending on how spectacular your stunt is, you receive a rating from 1-5 stars. Performing many of these stunts together creates combos for higher style points. Style points can be used to unlock videos of game development, concept art, or multiplayer characters (more on the multiplayer part later).

The single player campaign will take approximately 10 hours to complete on the normal difficulty. There are four difficulties in all. You start out with Casual, Normal, and Hard. After completing the game on any of the first three difficulties you unlock "Hard Boiled" - the hardest difficulty for those who feel they've mastered the game. If you want to play the game in a challenging way, the Normal difficulty is a good place to embark. If you really want to have fun with the action movie feel to the game and do as many stunts as possible, you may want to begin with "Casual" first. The game starts off pretty easy but  becomes progressively harder as the game advances through its seven levels. Unfortunately the difficulty balancing is the beginning of Stranglehold's list of flaws.

You'll mainly find yourself having to repeat levels over and over due to poor design choices. Enemies randomly spawn in locations out of your sight. They either pop out from doors that automatically open and close for enemies, or simply appear from behind a shelf of some sort. This is especially annoying when the enemies, armed with shotguns, take out large chunks of your health before you're able to turn around. These types of cheap spawn points are usually the reason for sending you back 20 minutes to one of the rather rare checkpoints. This makes it seem as if you died because the game was being cheap, not because you're an inadequate gamer.

The game tries to prevent the cheap spawn points from always killing you by giving you a few special abilities. You start out with a simple "heal" ability, which you'll use frequently. Shortly thereafter you gain "Precision Aim," "Barrage" and "Spin Attack." Precision aim allows you to zoom in with a pistol in slow motion and shoot an enemy from long range. This ability is particularly fun due to the variety of death animations. You can shoot an enemy in the forehead and watch his eyes move to the top of his skull, or shoot a bullet at someone's throat and see blood spray out of his mouth as he tries to scream. There's the fan favorite -- shooting a guy in the crotch and then observing one of the most painful looking things in the game. Barrage gives you unlimited ammo and invincibility for a limited amount of time so you can wreck carnage on your enemies. Finally Spin Attack kills all the enemies in the room with a short spiffy animation of Tequila spinning around and shooting like a mad man.

In order to use these Abilities you have to kill enemies, which builds up a green bar. There are four green bars in total -- one green bar allows you to use Precision Aim, two lets you use Barrage, and three lets you do Spin Attack while Heal can be used whenever as long as you have some part of a green bar. While all the abilities are fun to use, they're not all very practical. Spin Attack is too expensive while Precision Aim doesn't have as much bang for your buck since you can only kill one enemy at a time. You'll find yourself using Barrage and Heal more so than the other two abilities.

Along with the single player is a multiplayer component. Surprisingly the multiplayer is not half bad, but it's not a multiplayer focused game. It'll keep you interested for a few hours, but it's nothing you'll really want to invest much time in to. However, the game does have a very high replay value since a different amount of things can happen in a single fire fight during the single player. But anyway you slice it, you won't be spending much time with Stranglehold due to its rather short length.

When you add up the abundance of action, intense shoot outs, enormous explosions, crazy stunts and large guns Stranglehold would be a very good action game if it came out two years ago or was only $40 dollars. If you're a fan of crazy ridiculous action games and feel a need to play another one, then this is a game for you. If you're looking for a good sequel to "Hard Boiled" you may just want to pick up the DVD.  There's no thick plot or any real development of characters that makes you feel that John Woo was actually part of this game. If you're short on cash and waiting for the big blockbuster games this Holiday Season, you may want to skip over this game. Stranglehold probably best serves as a rental unless you're really into action games.