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.

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.

Stranglehold’s second level has got to be of the biggest second level fumbles in gaming history.

Level 1 is a brisk and impactful introduction to the game’s systems; you slip across tables, slide down handrails, and dive through the air in a slow-motion bullet-ballet. As expected. In Level 2, “Destroy 16 drug stations” is preceded by “Destroy 10 drug stations” and followed by “Plant x amount of C4 charges” (I can’t remember exactly but it’s too many). I’ll experientially translate it for you: “Stop giving us your time”. This game takes maybe 6 hours to complete, yet it feels like 5 1/2 are spent in the second mission. Historians have long been baffled by the inclusion of a helicopter turret section, and as to why it isn’t the end of the level.

Stranglehold gets back on the rails in the subsequent mega restaurant area, and the rest of the game (mostly) flies by, but I’m astounded I had the patience to push through the docks level as a kid or now.

Chow Yun-Fat go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

A take on the max Payne formula (which was inspired by John Woo movies) Stranglehold is a lot of kinetic and crazy along with being a near perfect replication of Woo’s action set pieces.

Difficulty balancing sucks ass thought, so I’d recommend to start immediately on hard if you wanna get a challenge from the start.

Those were some intense 5 hours.

What can I say? I'm a sucker for Max Payne-like games. If done right of course. This game isn't done right. And I wished it was.

It starts vey good. The level is big and adds a lot of dynamism to it's design. Teaching the basics as any game should. But then it devolves into a shooting gallery in the Third Chapter (Restaurant).

Enemies start appearing from spawn points, doors to be exact. Like, for a really, really long time. I counted, and some last for about 5 minutes or so on the same room. After some time fighting enemies, one of the many doors unlocks for you to go, but you have to hurry, because infinite enemies will appear to shoot you, unless you cross that door. It was dreadful the first time I realised this. They will keep spawning infinitely so there is no reason to stay there.

Tequilla is very jank to control. Pretty much like Max Payne 3, you can only dive through levels. Not jump exactly like in Max Payne 1 and 2. But the camera is so close to him in this chaotic shooting game it almost gave me motion sickness. And everything is so fast, bullets flying everywhere, enemies spawning. It's a nightmare.

Tequilla can perform some cool moves like a Wall Jump to a Dive, which is cool but it's not optimal. For the most part those are contextual actions. There are some more, like sliding through rails, vey cool and fun to use. You can cover too, a cover system from the era...it works better than expected.

Bomb Gauge is basically a power meter. There, you can perform 4 special commands such as giving you health, a Precision Aim Bullet, a Rage Mode and the Tornado Spin, which is basically a cutscene that kills all enemies on screen.
Those are very useful in combat, some are even broken against bosses.

Let's talk about the bosses. They suck. They are more powerful enemies with a healthbar and a shit ton of life. They have some special qualities to them too, but for the most part are normal enemies with more life and more complex patterns, adapted to the current arena you're fighting in.
I was fighting a boss that threw granades, very hard. Remember I talked about enemies infinitely spawning from doors? I accidently enter one of those doors the second an enemy opened it. I got trapped in a empty room that clearly wasn't meant to be seen. The boss was at the front of the door, keeping throwing granades to it, but it was locked so the granades kept exploding on him everytime. I ended up winning by accident, hooray. It was very hard and just plain bad so never even tried to beat him properly.

The levels were a bit dull. For the most part straight hallways with obvious open ended areas with structures for you to cover. The last levels are filled with med bags that stick out of the level aesthetic, very close to each other too. Those fully heal you once you touch it. That saved my entire playthough.

Don't play this game please, or at least just get through the first two levels and quit. It doesn't get any better than that. It gets worse and worse the more you go.

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.

“I made like Chow Yun-Fat” - Some random guy with a trenchcoat

A Max Payne-inspired John Woo game seems like a neat idea at first, but in execution it isn’t the best. The combat and movement systems are the true successor to the mechanics Max Payne showed back in the day, with a lot of options to make use of. You can wall-jump, walk and slide through railings, ride a cart while shooting everybody, slide over tables and not only you can lay on the ground as long as you want (in a more intuitive way than any Max Payne game by holding the same key, may I add), you can also roll on the floor. There’s a ton of stuff to work with in enemy encounters. The problems I see here are two: 1- Half of these mechanics aren’t even useful most of the time, and the level design, consisting mostly of enclosed and/or full of props spaces, doesn’t give way to play with and test them. And 2- The game swarms you with enemies non-stop.

This last problem is the most harmful because it’s sooooo constant it turns the game boring and even frustrating. Which, you know, is what happens when a game swarms you with enemies… even more if they’re walking bullet-sponges… which they also are… Every firefight feels like an endless survival for your life, there’s barely any time to think and when you think to yourself “is it over?”, five or more enemies show up from literally nowhere to destroy you. Thankfully they do not drain your health as fast as some other games, but I dunno, you fight like 50 or more enemies per encounter and like 3 to 6 enemies, if not more, at the same time. It’s just tiring to play after some time. And then, the game dares to throw you its god-awful boss battles that are just spamming one of the four skills you have. And for the Vlad boss fight, it’s not even clear which one of the skills you should use, so not only is it tiring, but also suffers from a lot of trial and error. I mean, if I were to play one of the first four chapters of this game for like twenty minutes or so once in a while, I might have fun. And I do have fun with it! but this game is just tiring to finish, because it starts throwing more tanky enemies with more powerful weapons and more health at you. Sure, you can use the skills you have, but using a ten seconds god mode and infinite ammo trick isn’t my definition of entertaining.

Visually this game is very reminiscent of the films John Woo used to make (because he DIDN’T make a new movie, right?), the environment is extremely destructible, everything around you can be blown up, and it is pretty awesome to see wood breaking and glass shattering while you’re doing every kind of crazy stunts in slow-mo. The levels themselves are pretty small though, so certain movements like wall-jumping and walking over railings are rather clunky sometimes and they might even get you killed if you don't have enough health or are not careful enough. This game has one of the truest “John Woo-like” mechanics ever made, and that’s the main reason I gave this game this rating, but none of its elements come together to make a game that works properly, exceeding in bs and clunkiness to a point where it becomes just frustrating to play.

John Woo's Hard Boiled is a phenomenal action film with masterfully choreographed action sequences, engaging and fun characters, and a unique dreamlike atmosphere. The idea of making a video game sequel to it, then, sounds ridiculous only on a surface level. All of these elements, at least in theory, threaten to make something that's at least interesting. That's exactly where Stranglehold comes in, the self-purported sequel to the seminal action film, developed by Midway Chicago with Woo's blessing and involvement. Does the American developer do the Hong Kong film justice? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it's entirely worthless either.

Stranglehold's biggest boon is the game design, which allows you to do all kinds of cool moves. Diving, flipping, and even carting around the levels is fun on a primal level and for the most part the level design accommodates for that. It typically doesn't restrict you without some sort of point (there's an entire boss fight where they force you to work around a constrained arena, which is fun) and it's surprisingly challenging. Tequila Time (which is just a fancy name for bullet time), isn't just a get out of jail free card for damage, but an actual mechanic that must be learned. Treating it like a gimmick will result in death more often than not. The special moves are also quite fun, whether it be a berserk mode, a Sniper Elite-style instakill sniper mode, or a screen-clearing bullet dance. The gameplay isn't really anything special, by this point two Max Payne games had released and none of the concepts Stranglehold introduces feel fresh or unique, but they are largely well executed and its hard to complain too much when I'm sliding towards a group of enemies on a food cart. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the game's second level has to be one of the worst pacing killers in gaming history. The first level begins as the perfect tutorial, only for the second level to turn into an extremely tedious, overly long and poorly designed hunt for drug tables that of course, culminates in an overly long, unchallenging, and dull turret section. It's everything that the 7th generation of gaming is often unfairly stereotyped as, brought together into one level. Thankfully after that the rest of the game is largely smooth sailing, but it still suffers from flaws such as difficulty spikes and bullet-sponge boss fights that are largely uninteresting. Nevertheless, it does at least generally capture what it would be like to play through a John Woo film, and it deserves some commendation for that.

While Stranglehold is often quite fun, that's not what makes it a disappointing sequel to Hard Boiled. Rather, Stranglehold on a narrative level feels entirely disconnected from it. That's not to say the game needed to be a direct sequel to the film, but rather that it should have had anything to do with it at all. While you do indeed play as Inspector Tequila and the main antagonist is the father of the film's antagonist, that's where the similarities end. Stranglehold's scenario feels like you could have thrown any character ensemble in and it would be the exact same, just with Chow Yun-fat at the lead. There's none of the fun character dynamics or memorable heroes and villains of the original film and everything feels particularly stock. Viewed on its own terms, it's not exactly exciting either, feeling like any generic action film with no memorable characters, narrative stakes, or creative scenario writing. Yung Gi is sort of a fun character, and Tequila occasionally has some funny quips, but it doesn't carry any of what made Hard Boiled not just fun, but narratively gripping.

The presentation is sort of hit or miss, carrying many appealing aspects but once again failing to capture the atmosphere of Hard Boiled. Hard Boiled was a dreamlike, jazz-infused, diffused vision of Hong Kong which Stranglehold completely fails to capture without offering up a unique atmosphere of its own. It feels disappointingly contemporary, not offering any unique elements of the late-2000s. In essence, it lacks atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it always looks totally uninspired. The casino level has some fairly nice art direction across the board but for the most part the rest of the game is mostly generic aesthetically. Grey corridors, bloom-laced beaches, none of which look bad necessarily but fail to make an impression. Graphically speaking I feel Stranglehold is simultaneously quite impressive while also looking very behind the curve. The game looks very flat, and that's because the lighting is quite poor. Areas simply lack proper shadowing and look washed out and lifeless. Facial animation is actually very expressive, but character faces themselves look like potatoes more often than not. Texture quality is often absurdly low and this can really stand out when its stretched across a large wall. I do want to give Stranglehold some slack however, and that's because of its extensive destruction system which allows you to blow every single part of its environments to smithereens. This necessitates environments being fairly detailed, and watching it all fall apart is exciting. It's impressive just how extensive it is and is the closest the game comes to feeling like Hard Boiled. Due to being developed primarily for systems with less than a gigabyte of RAM, I find it somewhat excusable that Midway had to pair back visual fidelity in order to achieve this. Stranglehold certainly isn't a looker, but I'll give it some slack for it's impressive destruction system.

What I don't find excusable is its lackluster PC port. The game only offers you two adjustable graphical options, both being simple toggles for dynamic shadows and decals. The lack of proper visual options or scalability means that toning down visual settings for older computers would result in minimal performance gains, while also meaning you can't crank the visuals up much further than the console versions on more powerful computers. The lack of any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering at all means the game often looks blurry and shimmery without forcing it externally. Hell, the PC port doesn't even properly support widescreen resolutions without a mod, which should tell you all you need to know about its quality. The only good thing is that the framerate is uncapped, which is actually pretty nice, especially when most Unreal Engine 3 games were capped at 62 FPS by default. All of these issues can be fixed fairly easily with mods, but shouldn't have been problems to begin with.

The soundtrack left me wanting as well. Hard Boiled's original score was dominated by jazz and drum machines, and outside of small homages, Stranglehold's score is mostly made up of extremely generic 2000s action game music. I struggle to even describe it because it is fairly generic and unimpressive, failing to build an atmosphere or push the player forwards. The main theme is nice with its Asian flutes and vocals, but that's about all that stood out to me. A huge disappointment considering how important music was to that original film's presentation and characters.

If I'm to be completely forward, Stranglehold is not a good sequel to Hard Boiled. It doesn't understand what made that original film tick in terms of writing, atmosphere, or presentation, seemingly thinking that the film was defined solely by its action. As a standalone third-person shooter though, it's pretty enjoyable in its own right. Aside from a terrible second level, the gameplay might not be special but it is very entertaining and the game is short enough to where it doesn't quite overstay its welcome. The amount of cool moves you can do while tearing everything to shreds in the game's mostly solid levels is well worth the $10 price of admission, especially for fans of John Woo's filmography and style of direction. However, the game lacks atmosphere, its soundtrack is bland, the story is drag-and-drop generic, and it's presentation is somewhat understandably lackluster given its technological goals. It's a fun distraction for a few hours, but it isn't exactly a hidden gem either.

text by tim rogers

★★★⋆

“SO SLIPPERY IT'S PSYCHOTIC.”

In addition to being mostly a great videogame, John Woo’s Stranglehold also proves why games are not art, especially when they’re not trying to be: Stranglehold is so sleek it’s slippery, and so slippery it’s psychotic, and when every tiny input on the controller seeks to tell the game to be a blockbuster, the facade falls away and idiocy seeps in the second you stop pressing buttons.

The main character, Inspector Tequila, played by Chow Yun-Fat’s polygonal twin, is hard-wired to slide over any surface he comes into contact with. It takes the majority of dyed-in-the-wool videogamers no more than ten seconds to realize how hilarious it is that he slides over countertops and tables with such ease. There, not ten seconds in, most sneering gamers will have broken Stranglehold over their knee. No

The thing some might shrug off, though, is that Stranglehold is trying, really, really hard. It’s trying to be an actual blockbuster, not just the “gaming equivalent”. (Yes, we pause to reflect how ironic it is that it bills itself as the “sequel” to the film “Hard Boiled”.) At its core are enough spiffy concepts and neat tricks to earn it four stars — though only if you’re willing to play along, to get into character.

Your character is a man who shoots lots of people, sometimes in slow-motion. He dives and slides a lot. Sometimes he shoots people in the face, other times in the chest, and sometimes — if he has enough power in his special meter — he can kill by shooting a man in the testicles. The story of the game has something to do with the main character’s wife and daughter being kidnapped, though the first stage puts to rest any doubts that we’re going to have to think: gangsters call the police, asking them to send one cop to a certain location, where they will tell him what happened to a cop who disappeared a few days earlier. The cop was killed, of course, and our hero can’t even make his way to the rendezvous point without being shot at literally a thousand times. The story isn’t trying to be a sweeping epic, it’s about giving our character somewhere to go, so that he can get shot at (and shoot people) along the way. There’s dialogue, and there are some dramatic sequences, and it’s kind of revealing that cheesy John Woo flick dialogue acted out by the same hammy voice actors used to actually dub John Woo flicks actually feels leagues closer to the Mona Lisa than any other dialogue in most other games. Though essentially, the joy of the game is in the shooting, and — most precisely — the way things are shot, the way objects explode. It’s violent, though it’s not depraved — it’s just idiotic.

Literally everything explodes in Stranglehold. Early on, there’s a gunfight in a marketplace where you can destroy everything — people, fruit, wooden crates, concrete pillars. Shoot “glints” to cause small-scale environmental disasters to crush the bad guys. The glints are actually more interesting than they seem at first: as you pan the camera around, objects glint for an instant and then return to normal. That’s how you know that object can be shot. Shoot a glinting sign and it might fall on a dude’s head. Repeat for air-conditioners, steel beams, bags of bricks, dinosaur bones, whatever.

Lately, there’s been this poisonous trend in videogame design: Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue termed it the “Quick-Timer Event”. In many “cinematic” games since Shenmue, occasionally you’ll see a button icon flash hugely on the screen. Press that button to perform a special “cinematic” action. In Shenmue II, there were plenty of extended sequences with branching paths and clever animations. Say, if you missed press the A button, your character might get punched by one guy, though that might give him an opportunity to spin around and punch the other guy instead. Shenmue II kind of lost its way in a Quick-Timer sequence in which your main character tried to keep his balance while walking across ten successive steel beams, though for the most part, it was cute, and it seldom felt cloying. Further games would expand and fetishize the idea of the Quick-Timer Event, and eventually, we’re playing God of War II, where pretty much everything is a Quick Timer Event, except there’s really only one button you ever have to press. Recently, Ninja Theory, the developers of Heavenly Sword, had to defend their game when Tomonobu Itagaki, producer of Ninja Gaiden, jeered it for having relied on such epic Quick-Timer sequences as “pound the X button to run across this chain”. They said that the Quick-Timer sequences existed to allow players to experience a new level of cinematic interactivity, which they otherwise couldn’t experience through, you know, playing the game.

Well, Stranglehold, as a videogame and as a trip from many point As to many point Bs, manages to be both more challenging to play than Heavenly Sword‘s action sequences and more cinematically enthralling than Heavenly Sword‘s cut-scenes — not to mention quick-timer events. As in God of War II, every button press of Stranglehold is a quick-timer event; every button press is an action scene, a heavy metal guitar riff; every button press is The Biggest Motion Picture of the Summer. Except in Stranglehold, the player is always joyfully in control of the context. We’re shooting glinting air-conditioners or dinosaur bones to crush dudes we could otherwise be just shooting in the face. We’re winning “Stylish Kill” points for doing so, we’re using those “Stylish Kill” points to activate special abilities like Precision Shot (zoom in in ultra slo-mo to perform a one-hit kill on any one of twenty-something instant-kill zones on an opponent’s body (yes, testicles included)) or Barrage Mode (which gives you unlimited ammo for a few seconds — a crafty nod to the climactic scenes in John Woo films where the idea of clips dropping out of the guns in slow-motion as the hero reloads becomes too much of a cinematic burden, and he just shoots hundreds of bullets without flinching).

And every once in a while, there’s a standoff. Usually, the standoffs’ reasons for existing are not very clear, to say the least. In the first stage, there’s a standoff where one of the gangsters you’re here to meet tells you to go to a certain bar and ask the bartender a question. Then he and his four friends start shooting at you. Never mind the setup — it’s the execution that shines. The game just seamlessly slips into the setup sequence, and the camera pans around the armed men John Woo style. Keep your eyes on the screen and you just might catch sight of a few glints. When the standoff starts, in super-slo-mo, you’ll face the opponents one at a time. Dodge to one side and then the other to trick your opponents into shooting the wrong way. Shoot the glints to send exploding propane tanks careening into unfashionable mens’ bodies so hard that when they slam into a concrete wall, the wall cracks and buckles. Kill one guy, and the camera spins around to the next.

The setups and the locations of the glints get progressively more tricky, and it hardly ever stops being entertaining when you catch a gunman in the face with a flying gas tank. In something like God of War, when you press the X button at just the right time to send your hero jumping onto the shoulders of a mythical beast, where he proceeds to plunge his swords into the beast’s neck, producing a geyser of blood, it feels like all business — we’re not aiming the blade at the neck; in Stranglehold, it’s me aiming my gun at that gas tank. It’s me pulling the trigger. The game is only offering me a tiny hint — in the form of a glint — that something will happen if I shoot the gas tank. The glint might represent a spark in the hero’s imagination: he’s a chance-taking, risk-breaking man, and he didn’t survive so long on the police force in this alternate universe where everyone owns a gun without sometimes shooting at the most tangentially related stuff. It’s like, one day, he got shot in the arm, cursed a lot, and then resolved to stop trying to shoot guys in the face all the time and, wherever necessary, start shooting at random objects. It’s never done him wrong since.

Compare and contrast this, once again, to Shenmue‘s lame storytelling, where the hero has to actually ask people, in his hometown renowned as one of the largest ports in Asia, where he can find some sailors. Shenmue wanted, very hard, to be a gangster-schlock action epic, only it was apparently written and designed by a couple of guys who literally felt chills the first time they submitted a draft to their creative writing teacher in which one guy threatens to hit another guy if he doesn’t “shut up”; with Shenmue, in which the hero rides a motorcycle at one point and someone eventually gets punched, they must have thought they were writing actual literature. This mealy-mouthed-ness permeates into the deepest layers of the game design, and to many other deep layers of many other games’ design. Who would have ever guessed that some actual John Woo was exactly what the game industry needed? Compare the barroom brawl early in Shenmue — press the A button to pick up that pool cue — to a scene exceedingly early in Stranglehold, in which our hardened cop runs along a railing down a staircase, and the game kicks into slow motion, and dudes start shooting at us, and we can either shoot them or stylishly pick off the glints, fatally crushing them with air-conditioners and neon signs, all in real-time, all under our control.

Some would say that Max Payne pioneered many of the concepts employed in Stranglehold — such as bullet-time — though it’s safe to say that Max Payne was only ever drawing its inspiration from John Woo’s movies, anyway. Besides, Max Payne is too cheeky: there’s really only one impression of it you’re allowed to get. Stranglehold is dead serious, which means that if you want to find it hilarious, that’s your choice.

There are a few nagging issues, like the “health pack” dynamic — you can use Stylish Kill points to refill some of your health, if you so choose, which makes no sense in the context of a gun battle — and the overall exhaustion you might feel after trying to play the whole game at once. It’s kind of like Smash TV, in a way — as much as I consider it a masterpiece of simplicity and design, there’s really only so much of it I can take. The ultimate disappointment of Stranglehold — and it’s a small one — is that, well-sketched as the characters are, if you’ve never voted Republican in your life, there’s a huge chance you’re not going to care who the real bad guy is, nor will there be any actual suspense about whether the hero survives or not. The setup is a string of dumb red herrings and one-liners that stand no chance of being memorable thanks to the (admittedly awesome) way everything in game sounds like it was translated from Cantonese to English. Again we come back to four angry gunmen, having an incomprehensible conversation as the camera pans around and we count up the glints. In this way, the story comes to resemble the Swedish speed metal Picasso listens to while painting his next masterpiece: if there were no words, he’d stop painting and feel depressed. If the angry men weren’t talking, there’d be no reason to shoot them, et cetera. At least they understand the reasons they’re screaming. And when the game is off, no one needs to be angry anymore. It’s therapeutic, really. It’s extraordinary.
Top Line: Stranglehold is “one of the year’s best games, whether or not you play more than ten minutes of it. Steps in the right direction all around. When it comes to merging story and game, no one does it better.“


Games magazine-style quote: “First the exemplary Psi-Ops, and now this. Developer Tiger Hill Entertainment is one to watch.”

Starts off with a bang then immediately devolves into snoozetown in the second level as you try to thwart what seems to be the biggest drug operation ever (destroy 16 more drug tables chief) and then never recovers. Core mechanics are fun even if they don't seem to gel best with mouse+kb, common comparison is Max Payne but this could never reach the same level of artistry what with complete lack of interesting story or motives or atmosphere or level design or... Worth a play still but probably one of the longest feeling short games out there.

This game is like a nice fuzzy blanket. Dusted off my Xbox 360 that still surprisingly works and popped in this bad boy. I beat the first Max Payne recently and I just can't help but get a kick out of this specific pipeline: Hard Boiled influenced Max Payne, which then resulted in Strangehold, a video game sequel to Hard Boiled, that was definitely influenced by Max Payne. Love it.

It's barely worth even mentioning that Stranglehold hasn't totally aged gracefully; video games from previous console generations rarely do, we really can ease up on mentioning that when talking about older games. That includes myself, I need to get better at it. But yeah, jumping and bouncing around as Chow Yun Fat just blowing the everloving shit out of bad guys, the environment, and everything in between, is so fucking fun.

Build up your "Tequila Bomb" powerups and snipe a dude in the nuts from afar, unleash the barrage attack with dual wielding submachine guns on a squad of goons, or do the ultra slo-mo spin attack that kills all enemies on screen like a Contra special attack. The fact that Max Payne 3 came out 5 years later than this (which obviously, plays/looks/feels incredible) is a sign of how ahead this game was in 2007. Everything around you breaks, shatters and explodes in over-the-top John Woo style violence, blood splatters, bodies fly, bullets are always in the chamber as you never have to reload, ever. Brilliant!

Not a perfect game, the difficulty ramps up quite a bit near the end as it throws so many dudes at you at every angle, and it gets a little much at times (also the bullet-sponge bosses don't really do much for me). But holy hell, as a John Woo/Chow Yun Fat diehard fan I ain't rating this anything lower than 4 stars. A must-play if you're into either of them.

If you're still reading: Some personal suggestions if you love this game and are looking to check out other movies by Woo or starring Chow Yun Fat that aren't Hard Boiled. The following are must-watches:
- The Killer
- A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2
- Bullet In The Head
- Once A Thief
- Full Contact

If you're looking for a Max Payne level of quality here, you're going to be disappointed. That said, it's a fun arcade action game with bullet time mechanics and highly destructible environments that doesn't overstay its welcome.

The destructible environments, environmental interaction, and power-ups are the biggest differentiators from other Max Payne-inspired titles. Destructible environments in particular deserve some special praise here, as you can really trash most of the levels in the game.

Environmental interaction is another mechanic that the game relies heavily on, but I didn't find it to be that exciting. Performing various moves always felt clunky, and it relied on you finding a trigger point that would lock your character in place (like running along the handrails). Also, for some reason you cannot jump manually, which was a puzzling omission.

Still, there's fun to be had here, but don't expect much. The story can be completely ignored. I found that it takes itself too seriously, and the voice acting is pretty bad, too.

As always, if you're playing on a PC, check out the PCGamingWiki for instructions on how to run the game at higher resolutions.

Despite the fact that Stranglehold's campaign is barely 3 hours, I just cannot finish it.

Midway was a very dear publisher to me, they made and published creative and fun games like no other company (well, maybe THQ). Stranglehold is not a fun game, I would even say that it is not that creative either.

This is the sequel of Hard Boiled, a John Woo film that seemingly everyone loves, despite the fact that John Woo's career almost ended 2 times before. He is not that good of a director and his style ages like milk.

His over the top action style is the core of the gameplay here. It almost feels like a railshooter, because you need to interact with the environment and also react quickly to enemies in order to gain style points, and the more you do this, you fill up a meter that let you do some "crazy" things like heal yourself and infinite ammo.

It is essentially an arcade game, but what makes this game really irritating are:
1. The camera is too close to your character, sometimes even basic navigation is chaotic.

2. The bosses are laughable. They are bullet sponges and they have very idiotic gimmicks that will make you suffer.

3. After the second chapter, the game becomes a gimmick festival, and you need to survive through waves of enemies while protecting a jazz band, avoid laser traps and etc. It sounds fun, but it is not at all.

I really wanted to like this game, but I just cannot. I am nearly at the end but the whole gameplay is just so bad.