JOHN WOO’S STRANGLEHOLD
Reviewed on Xbox 360 also on PC, PS3 Developed by Midway Games. published by Midway Games.
John Woo pulls a Sid Meier on Max Payne and here’s the result…
Midway’s big title of last year is actually pretty good. Developed by Tiger Hill and with about 300 middleware companies, Stranglehold is the closest thing we currently have to a next-gen Max Payne game and hopefully there’s more of this sort of thing to come. It’s not super deep, but that’s why I loved it. It’s a sequel to a 1997 John Woo movie Hard Boiled starring Chow Yun-Fat, a movie I’ve not seen in a genre I normally avoid so call me a n00b on the subject matter.
You play as Detective Tequila, who looks and sounds exactly like Chow Yun-Fat (unlike the upcoming Bourne game with its Matt Damon-free countenance) and you basically go from one end of the level to the other and blow the living shit out of everything. It is fairly consistent in its intensity but at least you do have some breathing space, even if its just a loading screen masquerading as a loading screen. Gameplay consists of shooting, bullet time, with some moves depending on building up a special meter so that you have precision aiming, rapid fire and a smart bomb type move which kills any enemies around at that time. You often see a glowing line above railings you can run along or things you can hang from which helps you get to some of the trickier spots. The levels are few in number but fairly long, but they tend to become a bit repetitive. The devs have spiced this up as much as they can but in the second level you have to destroy 6 drug labs, then destroy 8 drug labs, etc and this gets a bit much, though at least this levewls is huge and the topography changes regularly. Fortunately, each level is very different to any other level so after one sprawling level,, you’ll have a more contained one where you go progress through the floors of a casino until you reach the boss battle at the top.
The presentation is excellent. Its an Unreal 3 engine game that at least looks as though there’s some colour other than brown. It’s a colorful game and runs very smoothly on 360 (the game is also on PC and PS3). The visual effects are impressive though some textures on a few backgrounds look a bit blurrier than they should. The amount of detail in the world is beautiful and you can shoot the shit out of everything in your path (apart from making holes in walls that you can walk through).
The audio is also excellent, The music is standard action fare but well done in all instances. Sound is crisp, the guns might sound a bit weedy at first but this is welcome since you hear those gun sounds soooo often (I found the gunfire in HL2 to be deafening compared to everything else in the game).
There’s multiplayer modes but I tried unsuccessfully to find a game at all so I don’t know whether the DLC map pack would be worth your money. The game is short – 2, maybe around 5-8 hours depending on your skill and the difficulty level you choose, or whether you want to try and get a higher score for each level. Also – it’s region free so don’t pay full price figuring there’s MP to keep it alive. It’s a great game, if the price is right.
So, here I am saying I liked another game. Gee I do that a lot, but then Xbox 360 demos have proven a great way of picking out the bad games. This was a game I liked from the demo and said I would get it once I was able to get to it and I’m glad I took the time.
Would I get a Stranglehold 2? If it was at least as good as this (and as cheap as I got this), then yeah.
C1 Rating: 2/3
