John Woo Presents Stranglehold stars martial arts star Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Tequila, a detective in Hong Kong's police force who is traveling the globe in search of his kidnapped daughter. The game features a single-player story mode in which players take the role of Tequila and fight their way through cities such as Hong Kong and Chicago to locate the missing child who is held captive by mafia members and gangsters. Players will have the opportunity to earn style points by performing such moves as running up banisters while shooting and when enough points are acquired gamers can execute moves that include the "Tequila Bomb" or enter "Tequila Time." "Tequila Time" is a sequence during a gunfight when enemies are slowed down while players maintain their speed, making it easier to hit enemy targets. Up to eight players can get involved in multiplayer action through the Internet, and the environments within the game are fully destructible and interactive.
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If this game were only the first two levels, it would easily be four stars.
When I first heard of this game I immediately thought of the Ted Nugent song which if you hadn't listened to the song before is a guitar-driven track with a real "I'm gonna kick some ass" feel to it which strangely enough fits this game. I am a big fan of the action movie genre and a HUGE fan of John Woo's work with "Hard Boiled" being one of my favorite movies ever so I was very eager to play this game because it was a sequel to that film. In the gameplay aspect, it fires on all cylinders it's such a balls-to-wall kind of game that I wish we got from a Max Payne game (Max Payne 3 is kind of close) the movement is so slick and satisfying and I love all the things you can do in a stage with my favorite being able to ride on those carts also the tequila bombs are cool. Story-wise though it doesn't strike me in any way which is strange because it's John Woo but whatever you don't play stranglehold for the plot. I wanna give a shoutout to this game for having one of my favorite levels in a video game which is that part where you fight these guys while a jazz band is forced to still play and you have to protect them it's so cool. Though the game is extremely jank and that fov is so ugly.
A flawed, yet cathartic, gem.
I'll start by saying that I haven't watched Hard Boiled and am mainly familiar with John Woo through cultural osmosis and some movie clips, so I won't be commenting on how the story works as a sequel to Hard Boiled, but it doesn't have any returning characters asides from the lead if you care about that. Also not touching on the multiplayer cause it's dead.
This game is the result of a development studio working under a sinking publisher trying to translate the "gung fu" style popularized by director Woo, and previously partially represented in videogames by Max Payne, into an interactive spectacle. It's probably easy to say that this is a Max Payne rip-off, but with the little I've seen of the director's movies, I think this game was going to end up playing like this regardless of if Max Payne had done it first or not.
So what is this really like in practice? Well, there's some problems. A lot of the actions in this game, in terms of movement, are either automated or guided. You automatically vault over low height objects like tables, and things like jumping on rails or taking a zip line down only work when the game thinks you're in position and highlights the point at which the action starts, where you're supposed to press the jump button. Another thing that's automated is the slow motion Bullet Time, here named Tequila Time, which will automatically kick in during acrobatics or when aiming under cover as long as you have some Tequila juice filled in the bar.
The way I described those things may even sound really bad, but the interesthing thing about this game is that once the level design clicks in, it all works. Instead of always being a linear affair where you're pushing forward through small groups of enemies, often in corridors, like in Max Payne, Strangehold will throw you into combat arenas filled with cover, jumping points, usually two floors and many entries for dozens of enemies to ambush you. It's in these moments where you're improvising where to jump to, seeing your bullet time kick in, stacking up combos with kills as you take cover, jump and vault around where the game shines.
The developers worked on the engine to get some of the most impressive destructible environments you'll ever see. So many objects can be destroyed, enemies come at you from all angles, the walls get chipped away by bullets often losing you your cover and you must keep that murder momentum going to fill up your Tequila Powers to use Tequila Bombs. The Tequila Bombs are special abilities that require you to kill enemies to fill their bar, and they're all useful in some way. First you can heal, then you get to use a precision shot, followed by the ability to get 30 seconds of invulnerability paired with unlimited ammo, and finally, a sweeping circle shot move that kills every enemy in the area. In later levels, the game will be throwing you so many enemies that you will need these in nearly every fight to survive, and so keeping your meter up to have a reserve of powers at your disposal compliments the otherwise basic gunplay.
Unfortunately, this game falters in the pacing and variety department. We have what's called "standoffs" which are basically shooting QTEs where you stand in place and must dodge slow moving bullets making sure you hit the target. The standoffs are pretty clunky, and will often lose you health no matter what you do, luckily we barely have a few of them throughout the game. The other part where they drop the ball hard is in the second level, a linear affair where you must tick off objective targets to destroy to progress and it closes off with an overly long and mindless turret section. It creates a terrible impression of the game after the decent first level that actually had a cool combat arena, but luckily the game never falters like that again. It's just unfortunate that in trying to create variety, they simply kill the pace.
But all in all, this game is extremely cathartic. Played for 4 hours and 49 minutes to see the end, so it wasn't longer than it needed to be considering that shooting is all it has, and seeing my stats of how many people I killed and property damaged I caused in that time was great. After you finish up a fight, you leave behind an incredible trail of destruction as a result of all those bullets and explosions you used to survive. There's no other game quite like this that I know of, which is why I'm willing to overlook the flaws in favor of just taking it all in and enjoying it.
We need more like this, this is a great attempt at translating an action movie over to video-game form and another game that can work out the issues it had, led by a developer with more resources to work with, would simply be perfection under the right circumstances. The game is up for purchase on GOG and it's practically given away during sales, I really recommend checking it out if it looks cool to you at all.
I'll start by saying that I haven't watched Hard Boiled and am mainly familiar with John Woo through cultural osmosis and some movie clips, so I won't be commenting on how the story works as a sequel to Hard Boiled, but it doesn't have any returning characters asides from the lead if you care about that. Also not touching on the multiplayer cause it's dead.
This game is the result of a development studio working under a sinking publisher trying to translate the "gung fu" style popularized by director Woo, and previously partially represented in videogames by Max Payne, into an interactive spectacle. It's probably easy to say that this is a Max Payne rip-off, but with the little I've seen of the director's movies, I think this game was going to end up playing like this regardless of if Max Payne had done it first or not.
So what is this really like in practice? Well, there's some problems. A lot of the actions in this game, in terms of movement, are either automated or guided. You automatically vault over low height objects like tables, and things like jumping on rails or taking a zip line down only work when the game thinks you're in position and highlights the point at which the action starts, where you're supposed to press the jump button. Another thing that's automated is the slow motion Bullet Time, here named Tequila Time, which will automatically kick in during acrobatics or when aiming under cover as long as you have some Tequila juice filled in the bar.
The way I described those things may even sound really bad, but the interesthing thing about this game is that once the level design clicks in, it all works. Instead of always being a linear affair where you're pushing forward through small groups of enemies, often in corridors, like in Max Payne, Strangehold will throw you into combat arenas filled with cover, jumping points, usually two floors and many entries for dozens of enemies to ambush you. It's in these moments where you're improvising where to jump to, seeing your bullet time kick in, stacking up combos with kills as you take cover, jump and vault around where the game shines.
The developers worked on the engine to get some of the most impressive destructible environments you'll ever see. So many objects can be destroyed, enemies come at you from all angles, the walls get chipped away by bullets often losing you your cover and you must keep that murder momentum going to fill up your Tequila Powers to use Tequila Bombs. The Tequila Bombs are special abilities that require you to kill enemies to fill their bar, and they're all useful in some way. First you can heal, then you get to use a precision shot, followed by the ability to get 30 seconds of invulnerability paired with unlimited ammo, and finally, a sweeping circle shot move that kills every enemy in the area. In later levels, the game will be throwing you so many enemies that you will need these in nearly every fight to survive, and so keeping your meter up to have a reserve of powers at your disposal compliments the otherwise basic gunplay.
Unfortunately, this game falters in the pacing and variety department. We have what's called "standoffs" which are basically shooting QTEs where you stand in place and must dodge slow moving bullets making sure you hit the target. The standoffs are pretty clunky, and will often lose you health no matter what you do, luckily we barely have a few of them throughout the game. The other part where they drop the ball hard is in the second level, a linear affair where you must tick off objective targets to destroy to progress and it closes off with an overly long and mindless turret section. It creates a terrible impression of the game after the decent first level that actually had a cool combat arena, but luckily the game never falters like that again. It's just unfortunate that in trying to create variety, they simply kill the pace.
But all in all, this game is extremely cathartic. Played for 4 hours and 49 minutes to see the end, so it wasn't longer than it needed to be considering that shooting is all it has, and seeing my stats of how many people I killed and property damaged I caused in that time was great. After you finish up a fight, you leave behind an incredible trail of destruction as a result of all those bullets and explosions you used to survive. There's no other game quite like this that I know of, which is why I'm willing to overlook the flaws in favor of just taking it all in and enjoying it.
We need more like this, this is a great attempt at translating an action movie over to video-game form and another game that can work out the issues it had, led by a developer with more resources to work with, would simply be perfection under the right circumstances. The game is up for purchase on GOG and it's practically given away during sales, I really recommend checking it out if it looks cool to you at all.
Watch the movie Hard Boiled before you say this is just a Max Payen ripp off.
Falls victim of the early-new gen console control setting abomination, trust me, you have better dexterity by putting yourself to knitting under influence than doing a dive-while-shooting here and guess what? I've beaten this mother like 5 times. It's a sugar rushed Max Payne with a claustrophobic alcohol-poisoned juggling of eccentric and absurdly overboard gunplay, boss fights that sponge-bullets like it's feathers and duct-taped to mindless power meters for a redbull fuelled assembly line of henchmen like a ludicrous weaponholic wetdream. I've round up all my ridiculously demanding power-meter just to shoot dudes in the groin simply for the hilariously dramatic death animation, and the game expects you to multitask the humanely possible mayhem to re-fill these wonders. You must drop chandeliers WHILE moving WHILE jumping on air, and that's so absurdly convoluted for a newfound player but it sounds exactly like a John Woo'ism alright. The Killer is my go-to mindless testosterone action film by default, but this is a childish catnip for fever-dreamy exaggeration in the best, evidently broken and absurdly overkill fashion. Guilty pleasure.
it's literally max payne except he has mad swag and is goated wit da sauce