When I heard that legendary action director John Woo was getting involved in a third-person action shooter featuring Chow Yun-Fat as Tequila, I was more than a little excited. Stranglehold is a “spiritual sequel" to Woo's action masterpiece, "Hard Boiled", and certainly features all the elements you’d expect; dual-wielded pistols, hundreds of bad guys to shoot, slow-motion sequences, the occasional set piece gory death and a lot of explosions.
You play Tequila, a “take no-prisoners” cop waging a personal war with Hong Kong crime lords and their gangs. Tequila's ex-wife and daughter are kidnapped by one of the gangs and that sets you off on a righteous killing spree that’s spread over 7 chapters that take you from Hong Kong to Chicago.
Using a highly modified version of the Unreal 3 tech and Havok physics system, Stranglehold is certainly all-action, and just about everything you see is destructible or collapsible – and I mean everything. The game looks tidy and solid, the level designs are intricate and a lot of work clearly went into them, and the amount of damage you can cause is always pleasing and visually impressive. Shoot a bad guy from a high platform who falls - with realistic ragdoll effects - into rippling water with a big splash and you can’t fail to be impressed. Up close though, too many enemies look identical, their animation could have been better and some things look a little flat and texture-lacking.
Fairly standard controls see a responsive but slightly rough-looking Chow Yun-Fat dive, roll and jump around – although the facial likeness is good Tequila isn’t as anywhere near as detailed or as well animated as say, Gears of War’s Marcus or Mitchell from the GRAWs. Aiming is accurate but the movement lacks precision at vital times – not helped by the dive button (L trigger) being the same button as you use to leap on to various interactive objects and pieces of scenery. You can kick tables over for cover, swing on chandeliers, or slide down/run up sloping surfaces. These annoyingly glint white throughout the game, presumably just in case you’re stupid and forgot one of the main features of the game. These “interactions” work logically enough if you jump on a serving trolley (that rolls a short distance) or a downwards sloping handrail (you unsurprisingly slide down it), but if you jump on an upwards sloping object Chow automatically runs to the top – and this lack of control resulted in a few deaths on a certain level with laser trip bombs everywhere. All these “stylish” moves top up your Tequila Time gauge (picking up the Origami paper cranes dotted around the levels does the same thing); this is basically Stranglehold’s version of Max Payne’s bullet time. This can be turned on manually with ‘RB’ or it comes in automatically when you use cover or diving moves. There are so many enemies at times that you’ll feel overwhelmed, so thankfully you also have special moves called “Tequila bombs”; left on the D-Pad gives you a health boost, up gives you ‘precision aim’ (like a sniper view regardless of the weapon you’re holding during slow motion), right gives ‘barrage’ – a period of turbocharged fire rate & invincibility, and down gives you a stylish ‘spin attack’ – Woo’s trademark white doves fly and Tequila rotates whilst taking out all the bad guys in the immediate area. Tequila Time is always accompanied by the screen going sepia-coloured, and this makes bad guys more difficult to pick out from the background – why? Surely these periods of presumably adrenalin-fuelled reaction time advantage should have extra clarity if anything, not be portrayed in brown & beige-ovision.
Stranglehold has a multiplayer mode for 2-6 players, straightforward deathmatch or team deathmatch in maps themed on locations from the story mode. This has the interactive objects of the story mode and lots of smashable scenery, but soon gets dull and repetitive. I think it takes something special to make a third person game work as a deathmatch game, and this just doesn’t have it.
I don’t usually appreciate unlockable “bonuses”, but Stranglehold’s can be purchased with style points earned during the story mode in a shop where John Woo himself stands behind the counter. These range from some really nice concept artwork to video tours of proposed levels to extra skins for the multiplayer game – they’ll even teach you how to make an Origami paper crane!
For all its action and excitement, Stranglehold is well named, because it'd take one to make me keep playing this for more than 30 minutes at a time. Why? – Well here’s why; because John Woo movies manage to be exciting, violent, balletic and funny. Stranglehold is certainly occasionally exciting, but more often a repetitive and so badly flawed in terms of everything from controls to the difficulty setting that it soon becomes a chore. The brutal fact is that there’s just too much action, too many bad guys, to the point where you’re just shooting wave after wave of inexorable, identical-looking respawning bad guys and it feels more like some old arcade light gun game than a state of the art action game. I can’t help thinking that a more considered, tactical cover shooter would have worked better than all these forced set pieces and manic action. You can crouch and use cover but as many areas have truckloads of enemies spawn without warning (seemingly right behind you) it’s difficult to play Stranglehold in any sort of tactical way.
If you play levels again and again you will learn to use set pieces and various bits of scenery to your advantage (almost like doing several “takes” in a movie), but the only time it ever flows like a John Woo movie is during cutscenes, and too often you feel like forced style is getting in the way of substantial gameplay. It’s a shame when a game that undoubtedly had a lot of time and care lavished on it disappoints at so basic a level, but Stranglehold just doesn’t play smoothly or stylishly enough for me, even after several takes.
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