Will always have a soft spot for games with bullet time.
jank but cool
has aged horrificly
has aged horrificly
Goddamn it, Stranglehold! You're a renegade cop, but you get the job done!
What a strange game. Less in terms of gameplay or subject matter, but in the fact that this has a legacy. There's just something about Stranglehold that made people gravitate to it for one reason or another. I remember this thing consistently placing on those turn-of-the-decade top ten lists; all of those early YouTube videos where they loop trailer footage in the background while talking at length about their favorite hidden, budget-friendly gems that everyone needs to try. Things were different in a pre-Xbox Live Arcade world, I suppose. Pulling this out of the Walmart bargain bin for ten bucks probably would have felt like the steal it was back in 2007. That is much less the case today.
GOG proudly advertises that this runs on Windows 10. This is a lie. Well, it runs, but it runs badly. The game consistently, quietly died behind a loading screen every single time I tried getting into Chapter 2 until I installed GOG Galaxy. Playing it through that got me all the way to the true final boss, Lok. Lok is some random henchman with a life bar and an MG42. Lok should be pretty trivial to beat, and I imagine that's the case for the console players. The problem with Lok is that his arena is completely destructible, and there's nothing that Lok loves more than using his gun as the bullet hose that it is. These things together aren't a problem until you realize that the game can't de-render all of the broken scenery fast enough, and it panics and kills the process once it has too much debris to keep track of. I think that's what's happening, at least. I downloaded a 100% save file off of a sketchy website to try to skip over it, but that somehow didn't end up unlocking anything. This marks Stranglehold as the first game I've seen that can arbitrarily decide to ignore your new save file even with the old one gone and cloud syncing disabled. I've also seen zero people complaining about these problems and thus zero people suggesting any fixes, which suggests to me that my computer might be haunted.
That said, I don't feel like I've missed out on all that much by being forced to stop at the end of Chapter 3. Mechanically, it's a less interesting, clunkier Max Payne. That's definitely not a bad game to be inspired by (especially since Max Payne was itself pulling from John Woo's filmography), but it's just nowhere near as fun or as visceral as the first two Max Payne games were. And half a decade prior to Stranglehold, to boot! "Blow up 14 meth labs to proceed"? Give me a break. Let me walk forward and shoot people! Hell, give me another five minute turret section if you really want to shake things up. The heavy-on-the-sepia, bloomy filter when you activate the fittingly-named Tequila Time looks less cool and more like I'm wearing beer goggles. The game's got a personality, which is more than you can say for most of what came out during the seventh generation, but it's nowhere near enough to salvage what's ultimately a pretty middling experience.
It would have been smarter to emulate this. RPCS3 can probably squeeze more stability out of Stranglehold than the PC port proper can muster, and at least that one comes with a copy of Hard Boiled.
What a strange game. Less in terms of gameplay or subject matter, but in the fact that this has a legacy. There's just something about Stranglehold that made people gravitate to it for one reason or another. I remember this thing consistently placing on those turn-of-the-decade top ten lists; all of those early YouTube videos where they loop trailer footage in the background while talking at length about their favorite hidden, budget-friendly gems that everyone needs to try. Things were different in a pre-Xbox Live Arcade world, I suppose. Pulling this out of the Walmart bargain bin for ten bucks probably would have felt like the steal it was back in 2007. That is much less the case today.
GOG proudly advertises that this runs on Windows 10. This is a lie. Well, it runs, but it runs badly. The game consistently, quietly died behind a loading screen every single time I tried getting into Chapter 2 until I installed GOG Galaxy. Playing it through that got me all the way to the true final boss, Lok. Lok is some random henchman with a life bar and an MG42. Lok should be pretty trivial to beat, and I imagine that's the case for the console players. The problem with Lok is that his arena is completely destructible, and there's nothing that Lok loves more than using his gun as the bullet hose that it is. These things together aren't a problem until you realize that the game can't de-render all of the broken scenery fast enough, and it panics and kills the process once it has too much debris to keep track of. I think that's what's happening, at least. I downloaded a 100% save file off of a sketchy website to try to skip over it, but that somehow didn't end up unlocking anything. This marks Stranglehold as the first game I've seen that can arbitrarily decide to ignore your new save file even with the old one gone and cloud syncing disabled. I've also seen zero people complaining about these problems and thus zero people suggesting any fixes, which suggests to me that my computer might be haunted.
That said, I don't feel like I've missed out on all that much by being forced to stop at the end of Chapter 3. Mechanically, it's a less interesting, clunkier Max Payne. That's definitely not a bad game to be inspired by (especially since Max Payne was itself pulling from John Woo's filmography), but it's just nowhere near as fun or as visceral as the first two Max Payne games were. And half a decade prior to Stranglehold, to boot! "Blow up 14 meth labs to proceed"? Give me a break. Let me walk forward and shoot people! Hell, give me another five minute turret section if you really want to shake things up. The heavy-on-the-sepia, bloomy filter when you activate the fittingly-named Tequila Time looks less cool and more like I'm wearing beer goggles. The game's got a personality, which is more than you can say for most of what came out during the seventh generation, but it's nowhere near enough to salvage what's ultimately a pretty middling experience.
It would have been smarter to emulate this. RPCS3 can probably squeeze more stability out of Stranglehold than the PC port proper can muster, and at least that one comes with a copy of Hard Boiled.
This game is such a mixed bag. It has a fantastic destructible environment with great quality at first, but slowly descends as levels go on. The game has entirely been designed around it and they really don't show it off in later levels. The story is interesting enough at first and feels like a Hong Kong action movie until it doesn't, and after the climax the rest of the story is totally rushed. The music is mediocre for the most part with a few tracks that stick out and the shooting feels both really good and bad. The game's bosses are terrible almost universally, not really requiring much gimmicks other than shoot them a bunch. I played on the hardest difficulty and while the actual game felt fair, the bosses simply didn't and were absolute bullet sponges. Overall a mediocre game with some really good moments and really captures that feel of an action movie, but there isn't enough to carry it fully through to the end to be an enjoyable experience, especially with how short it is with not much to unlock or reasons to play it again.
this is what i imagine a HQ PS2 game feels like, if this came out any later a lot of QOL issues this game has probably wouldn't be there along with most PS2 Era game design fundamentals.
This review contains spoilers
John Woo presents Stranglehold is a game developed by Midway; known for games like: Mortal Kombat, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, NBA Jam, etc.; and co-developed along with John Woo’s Tiger Hill Entertainment, which was co-founded by John Woo and his producer partner Terence Chang, this would be the first outing for Tiger Hill Entertainment. Before creating this company to develop solely one video game and that’s it; it’s main founder (John Woo) helped direct classic Hong Kong action movies such as: Hard Boiled, The Killer, Bullet in the Head and A Better Tomorrow; whereas his partner, Terence Chang, was his producer from The Killer onward until The Crossing (another John Woo flick which was a two part historical drama).
Their outing was actually a pretty good collaboration with Midway Games, utilizing the same heavily modified Unreal 3 Engine that they used in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (except with Havok Physics and a “Massive D” modification, link here: https://www.shacknews.com/article/45555/john-woo-presents-stranglehold-interview) and brought in the same director from Psi-Ops, Brian Eddy, to help develop this game.
The end result of this partnership was Stranglehold, a video game sequel to John Woo’s classic flick Hard Boiled; where you play as Inspector Tequila Yuen as you shoot your way through environments in the style of Woo’s old over the top Hong Kong action movies. You could say one of it’s influences could be, yeah I know, Max Payne considering their implementation of the action except with this game having more interactivity. It’s funny how Stranglehold was influenced by Max Payne, which was in turn influenced by John Woo movies as well. It’s kinda cool. The team was also studying John Woo’s movies every day to get a sense of the direction they wanted to take it in.
Now I don’t know too much about the development but I’ll give you what I can find. Announced in 2005 originally, everyone involved seemed pretty excited about the project, with both Midway’s side and John Woo’s side praising the collaboration, calling it “an interactive entertainment experience that filmgoers and gamers alike will appreciate and enjoy” according to Businesswire. They announced that the actors that would be joining (link: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/midway-unveils-hollywood-voices-for-i-stranglehold-i-) were Chow-Yun Fat (of course), Randall Duk Kim (who played the Keymaker in the Matrix), and Arnold Voosloo (who played The Mummy in the titular movies), amongst others. For Chow-Yun Fat himself the team flew over to Hong Kong where he lived and got body scans and voice over sessions with Chow in order to truly recreate Inspector Tequila in game; they also photocopied and then photoshopped a combination of people to create new original characters.
There was this focus on an east west hodgepodge (link: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/07/our-interview-with-the-art-director-of-stranglehold/) sort of mix that John Woo and the others wanted for the game, from eastern clothing styles on the characters to the location of Chicago to even the voice acting being only in English. The goal was to also create levels with the idea that if you haven’t seen it before in a video game, then it would be a good location to use. They decided to photocopy certain environments; which they then created in game with a wide array of destructible items. The idea was that the player would be able to use the destroyed objects to their advantage, like creating makeshift cover; along with making certain arenas able to have objectives completed in multiple different ways. (Link: https://www.psu.com/news/psu-interview-stranglehold/)
They met with John Woo repeatedly in order to get approval of the work that they were doing. He apparently loved the way that the team operated and gave them a lot of creative freedom, though he was also deeply involved with the process. Some of the things that were left on the cutting room floor (according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranglehold_(video_game)#Development) were the involvement of traditional chinese clothing, and apparently story beats such as the export of body parts. But other than that John Woo was happy with what they delivered, often helping produce and flesh out story beats, with him having the final say on pretty much everything (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oscMsnENTAI&t=2s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff). Usually this spells out bad news but in this case it ended up going pretty well.
The promotion for this game, it seems, was pretty good. They had the usual stuff, like Websites that have since gone defunct or belong on MySpace (https://myspace.com/strangleholdgame); Advertising the game in the extra section of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, being promoted alongside Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run, and a collector’s edition which featured the game and the full movie Hard Boiled on disc for PS3 (https://rbr.com/midway-games-delivers-campaign-for-stranglehold/), as well as receiving a Stranglehold branded Xbox 360 Faceplate (https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/7dcAAOSwsiJhFYby/s-l300.jpg), a shot glass (https://www.bonanza.com/items/like/262049959) and more interestingly, a comic which I can’t find.
The only thing I ever saw was a Limited Edition Bonus Disc for Xbox 360 that came with the game which I bought on Ebay for a couple of dollars in order to help make this video.
The thing that popped out to me the most however was their Movie Contest, True to John Woo. Announced in late 2007 (link here: https://rbr.com/midway-games-delivers-campaign-for-stranglehold/), contestants were to make short films that emulated John Woo’s style of filmmaking the most, with the winner getting 25,000 dollars (link here: https://www.gamezone.com/news/midway_announces_stranglehold_s_true_to_john_woo_short_film_contest_on_myspace/), a trip for two to Midway’s Chicago studios to meet the developers, an authentic "Hard Boiled" movie poster autographed by John Woo himself, some mobile phone with service, and a copy of Stranglehold. They would also tape an interview for Spike TV, where they would premiere the short film; They even had a lineup (along with some other games that look and sound mediocre, link here: https://www.awn.com/news/midway-brings-john-woos-stranglehold-more-e3) at E3, which I couldn’t find footage of the event just the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDayRrQ0Gs&ab_channel=WhichEntertainment). It was later released to positive reviews, around a 7 to late 7 out of 10 and was a mild success at 1 Million dollars but it was swept under the rug by the likes of an equally short game but with much more triple A budget, Halo 3, amongst other shooters that came out in 2007 (https://techraptor.net/originals/gaming-obscura-john-woos-stranglehold).That and the budget was like 30 Million, the cost of Midway getting way too generous with their money without being smart and also losing their billionaire gaming sugar daddy Sumner Redstone amongst other problems. And honestly? It’s a damn shame cause I thought this game and John Woo deserved more than that. Let’s talk about it shall we?
Plot/Spoilers:
The story begins in the intro of the game, where it opens up to Chicago and Hong Kong separately. The Russian Mafia kidnap a Chinese woman and her daughter in an apartment building in Chicago while at the same time two triad gangsters kidnap and murder a cop in Hong Kong. One Russian gangster knocks the daughter against shelves in the apartment to reveal a picture frame that shows a man holding her mother: this man is Inspector Tequila Yuen, one of the two main characters of Hard Boiled, and the playable character portrayed by the one and only Chow Yun Fat. For the story from here on out, you should expect slow-motion action scenes, Mexican standoffs, betrayals, more slow-motion action scenes, MORE Mexican standoffs, and about 3-5 hours worth of story. What I liked most about the story other than the action (no shit) is just that authenticity the game has with John Woo’s involvement. As you can tell, I basically worship the guy. He directs great action and great story, and to be fair the first one is done pretty well. The story isn’t bad itself, it’s good; but at the same time you can tell it was Americanized, for the Hollywood American gamer guys. Yeah that's the right term. It feels like it sometimes tries too hard to appeal to the West, not in the manner of everything is American. In that way, I mean it’s more so focused on everyone speaks English, it goes to America, it doesn’t really have the feel of John Woo films emotionally, it’s sorta like a worse Hard Boiled: it’s a fun ride and you enjoy yourself with the combat but you don’t come out feeling like anything particular in terms of sadness or goofiness. It’s basically a straight up action flick. I won’t be amazed by the mind bending twists or the feeling of overwhelming sadness of your girlfriend getting shot just as she was about to get eye surgery, it’s more so just an American action film but with John Woo dressing over the American cuisine, though the dressing is actually decently pulled off in my opinion.
Now I don’t know shit about food, but to me it’s good but it’s not personally my tastes to blend it together like that. I would’ve preferred more of a Hong Kong classic feel, because to me the most interesting action is from Hong Kong. If I had the choice to see Chow Yun Fat dive over a table, slide under another one and shoot a dude above him or Steven Segal wildly flailing his arms like an idiot while spraying a machine gun around and surprisingly hitting every enemy he comes across, there’s no comparison. Chow Yun everyday baby! It kind of feels like the two action styles mixed up in a weird way, it’s not totally bad, I like it the way it is. I would’ve just preferred if it was more into Hong Kong then the Yankee Doodle Doo if that makes sense, hell I would’ve loved it if they had a Chinese voice option with English subtitles like the way I watch the movies; though I understand that since some of it takes place in America that they have English as the main thing but I don’t know. I guess it’s just preferences.. So the story isn’t the most captivating but you’re not necessarily here for the story, you’re here to shoot people. And this game delivers that VERY well. So I’m going to talk about the story here, and I’m going to generally spoil it since it’s a short game.
Chapter 1:
It starts in Captain Lee, Tequila’s boss’s, office in Hong Kong where a voice message taunting the police about a missing police officer leads Inspector Tequila to disobey orders to wait for a SWAT team and go to the rendezvous point by himself in Kowloon Square to find out the fate of this cop. After shooting through a bunch of goons that try to ambush him he ends up in Kowloon Square, where he learns that the cop was already killed. The meeting itself turns out to be an ambush.
He makes his way to a nearby bar when he’s confronted with a standoff between him and more triads. When asked who killed the cop, he is told to “Go to Tai-O and ask an I-9”. He survives the stand off and continues to make his way through the market and into the bar where the I-9 Triad and Golden Kane Triad are making a deal for passports. Pop in a cameo from John Woo himself playing the same role he did in Hard Boiled; Tequila gets a drink as the deal continues on. Above the deal; two members of the Golden Kane, one the actual killer of the cop later revealed to be the right hand man to the organization.
Making note of Inspector Tequila’s presence, the right hand man (named Lok) tells the other guy that Tequila should be dead and to take care of the job before he leaves to go to a place called The Mega. A misunderstanding seems to erupt in the deal when Tequila’s presence is known and it goes sour. After a gauntlet shootout in the bar, golden disco boy brings out a rocket launcher of all fucking things to kill Tequila. It fails. It’s learned here that this was a message and that someone's trying to start a war between the Golden Kane triad and the Dragon Claw triad, to which the suited guys were members of the latter, being in a special group called the Imperial 9s, or I-9’s for short. The Golden Kane is led by a guy named Yung whereas the Dragon Claw/I-9 are led by an older man named Wong. After Captain Lee gives him a scolding about causing property damage and warns him not to go to Tai-O, Tequila ignores him and heads straight there.
Chapter 2:
Inspector Tequila later arrives in Tai-O, which turns out to be a fishing village, to ask around about the Imperial Nine stuff they were on about earlier while attempting to coerce the people in the village to talk to him by showing them a picture of the dead cop. One dude snitches about Wong being around only to be shot for it, which brings Tequila to go through the entire village and wipe out the triads. Along the way he destroys a bunch of drug labs, goes through a turret section and THEN blows up a bunch of boats. He sneaks onto a boat nearby, revealed to be Wong’s boat before being caught by undercover cop Jerry who is actually working for Wong.
Tequila meets with Wong where he learns that the reason why Tequila was brought to Wong’s office is because Mr. Wong needs Tequila’s help, no matter the bad blood. As explained, Golden Kane put out the hit on the cop and blamed him to make him look bad. On top of that the Golden Kane is hooking up with the Russian Mafia in Chicago and they want to muscle Wong out of Hong Kong. In order to do that they kidnap Wong’s daughter and granddaughter; Billie and Teko. The daughter is the same one that Tequila was holding in the picture in the intro, leading to the revelation that Tequila was dating her on the downlow against Mr. Wong’s wishes until he found out.
The only reason Wong didn’t send anyone out is because the FBI would bust his ass and the Russian, Zakarov, promised Wong that he would kill Billie and Teko from the footage. He decides it should be Tequila who rescues them, saying that he’s someone the “Cops won’t watch”, which is also wrong considering DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY GUYS THIS ONE MAN HAS KILLED? A LOT. Police murdering suspects isn’t exactly well loved in the police dep….nevermind.
Blaming Wong for taking them from him, Tequila begrudgingly agrees after decking Wong in the face and blows up the docks nearby on orders from Wong because of Golden Kane’s attempted takeover. After Tequila plants the bombs, his superior picks him up on a boat about the usual good cop spiel before Tequila just quits on site, undermining Wong’s point about not being watched because now he JUST QUIT THE FORCE.
The final scene shows a flashback of Tequila and Billie meeting up, with Billie announcing she’s pregnant. He gets excited and proposes that they escape the country on a plane that same night. It then fades into Chapter 3.
Chapter 3:
Tequila arrives at the Mega casino that the big guy was talking about earlier, where Jerry gives him two Desperado looking guitar cases full of goodies and tells him the Golden Kane is meeting up on the top floor. Tequila shoots his way through like three to four floors while Golden Kane sends more guys down to kill him. After shooting his way through more guys, and protecting an entire band while shooting down guys in a difficult but cool as all hell set piece, Yung escapes the casino. It’s learned that he’s planning on leaving for Chicago to look at the Russian’s operations, hoping to move more Heroin that way.
To give him time, Yung leaves Lok, the cop killer, behind to take care of Tequila when he gets to the top floor. Tequila arrives at the top floor only to find Lok with a giant fucking machine gun and attempts to eviscerate Tequila. This however fails as Tequila is not only not eviscerated but he manages to escape with Jerry after Imperial Nines place bombs all around the casino. After jumping off of the casino american action style, Tequila and Jerry go to Chicago to chase after Yung. There was also a cutscene at the end where it shows Tequila at the plane waiting for his girlfriend Billie to arrive when Wong does the honors instead, with Tequila getting the shit kicked out of him by Wong’s guys. That didn’t show up for me on GOG, which I believe is a glitch since it shows up on the regular console version.
Chapter 4:
It skips to the present day again with Yung yelling at his boys on the phone after the attempt on Tequila in the last level has failed. Zakarov, the leader of the Russian Mafia, talks to Yung about his criminal operation at the museum and corrals Yung and the girls over there to look at his operation; while leaving his brother Vlad behind to kill Tequila and Jerry after they appear on the camera feed in the parking garage.
Meanwhile in the parking garage, the gang split up to search for clues and Tequila gets ambushed by a bunch of angry russians. He shoots his way up to the Penthouse only to encounter laser grids, explosives, a helicopter gunship and more angry Russians before running into this level’s boss: VLAD Zakarov. This devolves into a chase sequence involving laser patterns and not getting shot before running into the frustrating boss battle of the level: Vlad on the minigun of the helicopter. After you shoot him and take him down, you find Jerry in a broom closet shot in the shoulder with invitations to the Chicago History museum. Tequila heads off on his own to the museum, leaving Jerry there to take care of his wounds.
Chapter 5:
Tequila arrives at the museum only for some special forces motherfucker to spot him and snitch, causing Zakarov and Yung to get into an argument and blame each other for Tequila killing his brother Vlad. They strike a deal to bring Teko back to Hong Kong, while Billie stays with Zakarov and he brings her back separately. Tequila shows up just in time to crash the party and goes after Zakarov to get to Billie. He goes through Russian Gangsters, Triad Gangsters and Special Security looking gangsters to get to Zakarov and after they get into a battle while ends in Zakarov’s death. Tequila embraces Billie, and it’s learned that she missed the plane in order to keep both Tequila and Teko safe from her father before Tequila reveals her father sent him to rescue her.
Billie freaks out because she knows what’s up and that slimy piece of shit Jerry busts in and starts shooting, mortally injuring her. She tells Tequila that Teko was brought back to Hong Kong by the Golden Kane and being righteously pissed Tequila goes after Jerry. He eventually kills Jerry and picks up his phone which conveniently plays the full video shown against Wong. It turns out Zakarov is also conveniently threatening Wong with blackmail and exposing him as a criminal, making his daughter send him away to jail to keep Teko safe. The whole plan was to either send Wong to jail or get him to step down from leading the Hong Kong Criminal Underworld forever. Wong sent Tequila and Jerry there to have Jerry tie up any loose ends and advantages that Zakarov and the Golden Kane have against him. Wong then ends up conveniently texting Jerry’s phone at that specific moment, with Tequila responding back as Jerry telling Wong that both Tequila and Billie are dead, and that he will handle Teko before name dropping one of John Woo’s most tragic movies. Jerry attempts to kill Tequila one last time before he runs out of bullets and just dies, with Tequila throwing the dead cop’s badge onto Jerry as some sort of final fuck you cause it looks cool.
Chapter 6:
Tequila charges into Yung’s office in Hong Kong to strike a deal with the Golden Kane. Yung thinks that Wong will set up a deal, until Tequila points out that Wong is not honorable and shows him a text conversation proving that Wong was going to try to set up and kill them instead. The deal changes and Yung sets up the old drop spot in Yung’s old neighborhood, the Slums of Kowloon as the chapter select puts it. Tequila arrives in the neighborhood, where Captain Lee calls Tequila and tells him not to get involved with the kidnapping trade going on. Going against his orders, Tequila gives him the “I don’t want my badge back” spiel and fights through the slums in the shortest level in the game possibly.
Yung goes through with the deal when Tequila doesn’t show up on time; which ends up in a standoff between Tequila, a surprised Wong and Yung himself. Yung ends up dead, Wong takes Teko and Tequila shoots his way through them in a cutscene matching the spirit of the movies before chasing after them in a vehicle himself.
Chapter 7:
Tequila chases them back to Wong’s estate, going through hordes of men with throwing knives, rocket launchers and another giant attack helicopter, which after filling it full of bullets conveniently crashes into Wong’s front door. Tequila enters the mansion and finds Wong holding Teko hostage; who promises Tequila that if he takes Teko away forever then everything will be done forever. Not falling for his bullshit but trying to save Teko, he puts down his gun only to get ambushed by goons. Teko escapes via kicking the big bald boy in his balls and running away, and the big bald boy, named Da Pang here, and Wong get caked in bullets before Teko throws Wong over the railing to his death. With both Da Pang and Wong dead, Teko reunites with her father before the police captain freaks out about the paperwork that’ll have to be written up before giving Tequila back his badge. He gives it to his daughter and they walk off to a happy ending.
Gameplay:
The gameplay, the most important and fundamental part of a video game, to me if the story sucks I can at least play the game. And what do I think of the gameplay? It’s a nice, short couple hour romp of shootouts, explosions, more shootouts and explosions. I remember when doing research for this video that In an Ars Technica interview (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/07/our-interview-with-the-art-director-of-stranglehold/) with the game’s art director Jason Kaehler, he said the beta testing for the game led to about 12 hours of gameplay. I assume this comes from playing the game repeatedly to try out new ways because depending on the game difficulty you’re not getting 12 hours in one game, maybe like 4-5 depending. Honestly it depends on the difficulty you play and how often you die, for me it was like three to four hours of basically you going through little hallways and arenas full of interactables you can use to your advantage as you shoot your way through hordes of goons with guns waiting to kill you as fast as possible. It’s not necessarily the gameplay loop that’s the unique thing about it, you can go shoot people in any game with slow motion and it’ll still feel fun, like: Max Payne, Total Overdose, F.E.A.R.; like it’s almost always fun; they have different names for it but it’s the same concept.
They call this games version of slow motion Tequila Time and of course you can dive, slide and dodge bullets as you do cool stunts and kill people. In game you can usually just activate it by pressing the left mouse (or any other controller corresponding buttons) button (doing it on it’s own without any special moves) or alternatively if you press the spacebar you can do a dive and sometimes it automatically activates for you when there are goons around to shoot. I much prefer the diving because it looks fuckin cool as shit though when you fall on the ground and you start rolling everywhere it feels a tad awkward especially with 5,000 dudes shooting you and sometimes when there’s Tequila Time you end up sliding over everything which is funny but sometimes awkward depending on the situation.
There’s also this cool move I like to do where I use Tequila’s legs to boost himself off of a wall to do another dive. You can also crouch to take cover which will help in certain situations, you can kick up certain tables to add cover or you can press a certain button to take cover behind a wall, where you can peek out and shoot people. I didn’t really use these much and honestly I forgot about it, but I’m glad it’s there as it adds a nice thing of detail. The interactables I told you about are usually poles, railings, movable carts, chandeliers and the like, which usually helps you dodge stuff in slow-motion or alternatively depending on the railing it brings you to different places depending on the map that leads to collectible paper cranes, which fill up your special ability meter, called here the Tequila bomb.
What’s on the special ability meter? Four separate abilities: One is the healing option which I used way more than any other ability; another one is the ability to do a slow motion aiming thing, a reference to Tequila’s tense shots in Hard Boiled, where you zoom in to your gun and when you shoot it the camera follows the bullet to the guy your trying to shoot. My favorite place to shoot? The balls. Heh. But thanks to the engine and all of the good stuff it provides you could shoot almost anywhere and it provides a cool little animation pretty much.
The third ability is the ability I use the second most, something I call the “Murder everyone in your way” ability. Basically using this brings the camera over your shoulder and you shoot your way through everything in your path for a limited time, basically becoming invincible and with unlimited ammo. The fourth ability is pretty cool, it has Tequila spin around, with the trademark Doves flying out, and kill I guess everyone in your room but I didn’t find myself using that much because I like to know how many people are in the room and just because I like the action. Now that you know all of that stuff? You’re basically set.
You can use these abilities to murder everyone in your environment, but on top of that you can also shoot certain things in your environment that kills people immediately; for example: barrels or propane tanks (no shit), signs, suspiciously placed wooden things that hold giant boulders, etc. It’s all marked by giant white flashing lights and sometimes shooting this stuff is essential to get to the next place. Speaking of they used this Massive D engine pretty effectively, it’s not only this stuff that’s able to be destroyed but basically the whole environment is able to be taken down by gunfire, destroyed into bits and pieces, statues toppling over, it’s amazing what they did to make stuff destructible. This destructibility lends to the overall pace and difficulty of the game, which you always have to be on the move as if you stay in one place for too long the bullets will cut you to ribbons.
Staying on the move is essential because if you play this game on normal or higher you will get fucked up, using up most of your bullets (in which you’ll essentially have no ammo unless you go up to someone and smack em in the face and take their guns). The worst example I remember is the Museum level, where you get ambushed by a bunch of special forces looking guys with guns and the destructibility of the cover means you won’t be using much cover for long, especially since they’ll be spawning everywhere. I’d say the most difficult levels in the game for me personally would be the American levels, being the Penthouse and the Museum. The museum I just told you about but on the penthouse? It’s all sorta normal until you actually get in the penthouse itself, which will be rigged with 50,000 fucking lasers that will basically fucking kill instantly, with the only way to destroy the lasers would be through shooting the shiny white destructible stuff nearby.
What will you be shooting with? Guns obviously but the guns here are pretty standard, nothing unique or special but in the environment it makes sense: the usual pistols which you can dual-wield, shotguns, submachine guns (my favorite), assault rifle, a SAW in the later levels, a rocket launcher, and in secret and/or special locations a golden pistol which immediately kill almost anyone except bosses. Grenades were introduced in later levels but I didn’t exactly use them much either. All of this stylistic killing is in service for one thing: Stars which will be used to rate your style level at the end of the mission which humorously calculates the damage done to the environment. What do these stars do? Not really much except an arbitrary rating and I guess the ability to unlock a bunch of stuff later on in the shop. But the more stylistic the kill the more stars you get which means the better the rank.
Style is definitely in the game, there’s a lot of stylistic and special situations for Tequila to get into: again I mentioned the museum and the penthouse but in the second level you get into blowing up boats and shooting people on a turret and in the third level, Tai-O, you get guitar cases for the first couple of floors to drop in special arenas that help refill health and ammo, delivering a homage to old action alike. Before I stop I talk about something I mentioned in the plot spoilers: standoffs. Harkening back to the old action movies, in game Tequila gets ambushed numerous times by a bunch of angry gangsters in a giant group. This little minigame has you swing over to each person in the group in slow motion and dodge left or right while aiming your cursor over to the guy so you can wipe him out before moving to the others. Depending on the mission and environment you can use certain interactables to blow them up while you do it. I know realistically it would just be easier for everyone to shoot you but I guess you're super fast in game lore wise...until the later levels. The later levels have you do the dodging and shooting but with less slow motion, which makes it increasingly harder to kill and believe me getting shot in this game mode means taking a chunk of your health. Take too long and they’ll just skip to the next guy. Sometimes they make you continue the shooting until everyone's dead, most times they don’t. Overall I like the mechanic, it breaks up the pace and makes the game feel like a more interactive Max Payne.
And now that I’m done ranting about all of this stuff? My overall summary is yeah, the gameplay feels great in my opinion. Some of the footage has me sucking at it but I’m not too used to mouse and keyboard but other than that? There’s not really much I can complain about really except again it's a short single player which I would’ve preferred to be a bit longer and more in depth and sometimes the game feels kind of awkward? Oh and normal difficulty just switches up into fucking insane, which I can’t say it doesn’t feel fair I’m just a filthy fucking casual and I like having a more chill experience. Other than that, gameplay wise it’s perfectly great and I enjoy the fact it exists.
Atmosphere:
The first thing that I’m gonna be talking about here is the soundtrack. The soundtrack is pretty good, though you can’t really find the entire score on Youtube I managed to find a couple of pieces here and there. Each one of them serves the fighting going on in the background very well, escalating gun battles to the likes of an actual John Woo flick.
Apparently, according to IGN (https://www.ign.com/articles/2007/08/24/the-music-of-stranglehold-the-symphony-of-six) back when they were somewhat decent, John Woo enlisted about six composers to help compose the soundtrack. For what they did I thought they did a pretty good job translating the music into a good game soundtrack, though I think my favorite piece in there is the Jazz influenced one that slams the most. They have this little piece harkening back to Tequila’s love of being a musician and the Jazz Influence in Hard Boiled and honestly? To me this sorta stuff is the perfect track. In the article by IGN the guys making the music were told to stay away from the Jazz inspired score of Hard Boiled and...I mean they did good with what they did, they got some good drum action, some electronic stuff, etc.. I can’t complain really, though I did kinda wince when they said they took more influence from the newer Americanized John Woo style. Here are some playlists I found of the soundtrack on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL11FE86F12513E7DC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kckXCRQsf2c&list=PLZxdl25_WLrc50uG0MMyJCv2mnWx0NmCH&index=1&ab_channel=neruto
You’ll be hearing these tracks a lot, though I was never bothered by it as they actually fit pretty well, as it all blends into the background most of the time cause you’re so focused on actually shooting people then not. Though I did wish they went into Jazz a tad bit more than one track on the bonus menu and the actually legitimately tight Jazz piece they did in the Casino shootout where you protect the band.
They also said that they were trying to enhance the nuance of certain vibes and they did to a certain extent, only the action really. They had more somber tracks for more emotional elements but they don’t make me “feel”, like something in The Killer or Bullet in the Head.
The sound design itself is pretty tight too, the sound of bullets whizzing right by as you dodge it in slo-motion is tight.
While I was doing research and Watching the behind the scenes video, some of the notable things that stuck out to me personally was the engineers acquiring a bunch of breakable items in the studio and just smashing it in front of a microphone as well as having the instrument players during the jazz band section randomly collapse over certain parts of the composition, it’s little things like that that make me appreciate the sound even more.
I can’t complain about the sound design, nor say anything bad about it. They did an excellent job, from the wooden crates breaking to the sound you make when you collect paper cranes to the sound of just shooting someone in the dick. Yeah, no complaint about the sound at all. The only thing I would have to complain about is the voice acting.
Ahhhh the voice acting. What do I say about this? It's not awful, and I understand why they made everyone speak English, with the whole Americanized action thing they got going on with the game. But I’m mixed on it. On a personal preference, I felt since that the original movie was in Chinese that this game should allow Chinese with subtitles. There’s no subtitles to this game at all and the voices are only in English from what I can tell.
Another reason why I don’t care about the whole English thing too much is because whereas the voice acting is fine on the actor’s part, some of the delivery is…yeah. Especially in the first cutscene oh fucking Jesus is it bad. There’s no tension, no nothing. In these scenes they just sound like they don’t care. And I know that English isn’t Chow Yun Fat’s first language, again I’m not hating on him for that. I think he did well for the rest of the game considering. But dear god the first cutscene is laughably bad. Everyone else did an ok job, especially Russell Wong as Yung, Arnold Voosloo as Damon Zakarov and Randall Duk Kim as Wong, which hot damn I like his voice. He sounds like what an evil Triad boss sounds like; otherwise it sounds goofy and considering not too many people took gaming seriously I guess I'm not too surprised by that delivery.
I also understand that it would feel weird if everyone was speaking Chinese when they went to America but maybe a blend of it would work? Or maybe Tequila and Jerry speak a tad bit of English when they go to America for the two scenes? I don’t know, I can understand why they didn’t do Chinese but I would’ve liked an option to be honest, but for some reason according to a comment in the GGManlives video the guys at Tiger Hill required English, I don’t know why if it’s true but ok I guess. Subtitles I felt like they should’ve just kept in because of people who need it.
The Visuals, what can I say? For 2006 they’re pretty good in my opinion. I mean of course it’s 2006 no shit nowadays games like Ghost of Tsushima and the upcoming Cyberpunk and whatever look better who cares. I like the style they’re going for this game, in the behind the scenes video they talked about how they tried to emulate the film that the movie was made on for a specific movie style and I think they optimized the Psi-Ops engine pretty damn well to be honest. It looks pretty damn good if you play it on GOG with HD, but you’ll still get your usual character models from 2006; albeit with really unique story characters (like Lok) and less so the actual gangsters. Even then though they actually coded the game where it mixes and matches the parts of the goons that you shoot to give them different clothes and faces. You’ll still see a lot of the same clothing and faces but not as often which is cool. (Link here: https://gamedumpuk.wixsite.com/dump/post/john-woo-s-stranglehold)
Now, the best part of the visuals is the environments, especially with the destructibility fueled by an Unreal 3 modification called Massive D (heh) and something they called Woo Glue, which would hold the environments together and allow this destruction on almost everything on every level. You shoot a table on one end it’s destroyed in that one end and doesn’t fuck up the entire table. I can’t say much else about graphics wise but again I think the destructibility is actually a pretty impressive feat. I mean sure there are games from the past who also had destructibility but I don’t know, I actually like it a lot. It’s pretty good. The whole tan when you go into slow-motion I have no opinions but the slow-motion itself, the bullets flying by with the rings attached to it is also pretty cool.
Multiplayer/Bonus Stuff/Settings:
They also developed a multiplayer component to the game, but it’s not really active anymore, and to be honest I highly doubt it was active much to begin with but from what I saw it was the standard third person multiplayer thing but slow motion and interactive environments. If you were to try to boot up the multiplayer to make it work right now it wouldn’t. Servers are shut down, if you’re genuinely curious you can try to watch a video of the multiplayer but I find the ham-fisted multiplayer aspects of old games to be kind of boring, like the multiplayer for Condemned 2: Bloodshot as an example. I think it looks interesting but I feel like Rockstar did this better with Max Payne 3’s multiplayer, however keep in mind it was probably difficult as all hell trying to match up mechanics like these while attempting to make a tight multiplayer experience at the same time. Am I saying this multiplayer is bad? No. But to me it looks average.
So there’s nothing really of note multiplayer wise, but connecting it to the multiplayer as I said earlier, there is an area where you can buy multiplayer characters using the points you earn from a single player to get it. Except it’s not worth getting them so don’t waste your time just get all the bonus art and videos and stuff. The art is just the artwork for Stranglehold mind you but the videos are….interesting. One of these videos is a gameplay concept using the restaurant map from the first mission but using the old Psi-Ops models, and another is watching a guy show you how to make an Origami crane, facial animation stuff, etc. Some of the other bonus stuff there includes trailers for Wheelman and Blacksite: Area 51; and before I move on I just wanted to say I find this trailer promotion inside of other games to be fascinating, a thing of it’s era I guess but still heavily fascinating.
Other Stuff:
See now I’m going to go into more personal stuff so if you were just looking for a review of the game then yeah there it is. However I wanna go on about WHY I LOVE this game, even if it’s kind of average. See this all sort of starts when I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as a kid, Armageddon was basically my favorite fighting game I could get my hands on. I played that game nonstop, though I only popped in a couple of times in the bonus features. Specifically, the bonus trailers like Stranglehold have on It’s bonus menu. This game had Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run and John Woo’s Stranglehold and I was interested in the second one...except for the fact I couldn’t play it cause it was on next-gen consoles. I didn’t have money as a kid for that so I just forgot about it until WAY later.
I only got into John Woo films much recently, when I was bored one day searching through the internet I heard of a movie called Hard Boiled. Through just curiosity I found a full movie rip on Youtube (surprisingly enough) and I watched it. I loved it; it’s cinematography, the chaotic violent shooting mixed in with the thrilling plot and it’s tense soundtrack pulled me in and I was enamored with it. I thought the two main leads were great, and when I learned Chow-Yun Fat and Tony Leung starred in other John Woo flicks I decided to give all of his Chinese action movies a shot. Two of them, The Killer and Bullet in the Head, along with this one are amongst my favorite movies of all time. The Killer and Bullet in the Head were much more dramatic, sad, and at the time I was (and still am) a sad, depressed kid who enjoyed movies. These two movies are movies I consider to be art. Even the other movies that people don’t really think about like Heroes Shed No Tears, and Just Heroes are fantastic though Just Heroes really needs to go back into reprint. A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2 are fantastic, though the second one is my favorite for it’s really weird parts and it’s more so over the top action violence. Once A Thief is good too but it was my least favorite, though it’s commendable considering John Woo wanted to take a more lighthearted approach. I haven’t watched too many of his american flicks except Hard Target (which is good only because of John Woo’s direction) and Face Off, which is good schlocky fun but not really what I’m looking for. But I respect it, I respect what he does. And honestly I know he’s moved onto Historical Dramas and such, which I respect 100 percent but I would love to see John Woo do a couple more of these action flicks. This brings me into the next point.
I have this tendency to know about video games but not understand them. I heard of Stranglehold a couple of times here and there but I never really KNEW about it until I started my John Woo fanboy phase. When I learned he made a video game I shit my pants and went out and got a copy. In fact I loved it so much I got TWO Copies; and then I loved it so much that I got it on GOG, which unless you have an older console is the best place to get it nowadays as it’s only ten dollars, and honestly minus like two glitches on the fourth chapter it’s a fantastic looking and feeling game. Even though I think the game itself is sorta average I think the John Woo stuff brings it up, though I’ll admit I feel disappointed about the whole American influence. This American influence would later seep into the game’s rumored, then confirmed, then cancelled sequel: John Woo’s Gun Runner.
John Woo’s Gun Runner was effectively supposed to be a cover shooter by Midway which had Inspector Tequila and a character played by action star Vin Diesel, rumored to be his character from another Midway game: Wheelman. The leaked prototype footage would see them in Prague shooting through what I assume to be terrorists in a hotel in Prague, along with car chases and all sorts of high octane American actiony shit. Which in a way would sort of make sense, as to me Hard Boiled felt like the best action movie of all time just not necessarily the emotional stuff. Which to me is what a lot of American action movies are, not really a lot of good emotion just blowing stuff up, which is ok. And of course there’s going to be exceptions, and I’m not saying Hard Boiled was a dumbed down American action flick in Chinese form. To me Hard Boiled is the closest to the best action film (other than say Die Hard and the etc.), John Woo mastered what no one else did and did it beautifully, I remember at one point hearing a quote about how his style was moreso a drama with guns, a ballet of murder and honestly? I love it. But I also see why this game was more so gearing towards the American action crowd. In all honesty, I wish I could’ve seen Tiger Hill Entertainment work on Gun Runner, with the care put into the action in Stranglehold and hopefully changing it from a Gears cover shooter type and more so pushing the Slow-Motion action thing in it’s own way. At this point even if it’s not a game I would’ve loved to see a Gun Runner graphic novel and maybe repackage Hard Boiled, Stranglehold and Gun Runner into one complete box set trilogy of sorts. Hell I would’ve loved to see what he would’ve done with his game company in general, though later on Midway Games cancelled the project and switched to some other game called Gun Runner, dropping the John Woo aspect before just liquidating everything and closing shop. As for Tiger Hill, After this game they attempted to make game’s named ShadowClan, John Carpenter’s Psychopath, Clive Barker’s Demonik, amongst a couple of others before John Woo eventually decided to shift his focus onto films again. Which I’ll be honest it’s a shame, as I would’ve at least loved to have seen Clive Barker’s Demonik as well but it is what it is. He’s moved on and sometimes things just don’t work out. Also they were supposed to do a Stranglehold movie, which at first didn’t make sense until I did more research (https://techraptor.net/originals/gaming-obscura-john-woos-stranglehold) and learned that Director Stephen Fung was supposed to direct the movie and that the movie itself would’ve been a prequel with a younger Inspector Tequila. At this point however, I don’t know if I would want the movie just because of time eroding the prospect. The last thing I would want is a bad prequel like Carlito: The Rise of Power or a movie like The Irishman where they CGI’d the characters to make them look younger.
Where is John Woo today? Well since then he’s done as I said historical dramas, one action movie he released called The Manhunt (no relation to Rockstar) which I wanna look up and watch one day, see what it’s like. I know he also released a graphic novel around the same time as Stranglehold debuted called Seven Brothers and a game called Bloodstroke for the ios and android which I haven’t touched. Regardless of where he’s at now, his past has influenced so much greatness, so many movies and so many video games. I mean christ he’s influenced Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, The Wachowskis with the Matrix, I can’t list everything but it goes on. For video games it would be obviously the Max Payne series, F.E.A.R., I’m sure there’s so much stuff I can go on about but I can’t because then this would be an essay on John Woo with Bullet Time and not a game review and my overall thoughts on everything around it. But to make a final point of that, maybe John Woo didn’t invent his style, but he sure as hell perfected it.
Note: This was an old script I was making for a youtube review channel years ago, I just don't like editing or doing youtube stuff so I figured I'd edit a bit, spruce it up and remove video references. I still believe the same stuff but if worded weirdly my apologies. I played this originally from GOG but watched a buddy replay it on PS3 so I figured I'd throw my thoughts on here. Here are some extra behind the scenes footage as well from the bonus disc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZMGHj3s0AI&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVQYBj0A9o&t=77s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCeKYRYLLBs&t=1s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWcEg2a8wM0&t=5s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3t63Ty-0s&t=5s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
Their outing was actually a pretty good collaboration with Midway Games, utilizing the same heavily modified Unreal 3 Engine that they used in Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (except with Havok Physics and a “Massive D” modification, link here: https://www.shacknews.com/article/45555/john-woo-presents-stranglehold-interview) and brought in the same director from Psi-Ops, Brian Eddy, to help develop this game.
The end result of this partnership was Stranglehold, a video game sequel to John Woo’s classic flick Hard Boiled; where you play as Inspector Tequila Yuen as you shoot your way through environments in the style of Woo’s old over the top Hong Kong action movies. You could say one of it’s influences could be, yeah I know, Max Payne considering their implementation of the action except with this game having more interactivity. It’s funny how Stranglehold was influenced by Max Payne, which was in turn influenced by John Woo movies as well. It’s kinda cool. The team was also studying John Woo’s movies every day to get a sense of the direction they wanted to take it in.
Now I don’t know too much about the development but I’ll give you what I can find. Announced in 2005 originally, everyone involved seemed pretty excited about the project, with both Midway’s side and John Woo’s side praising the collaboration, calling it “an interactive entertainment experience that filmgoers and gamers alike will appreciate and enjoy” according to Businesswire. They announced that the actors that would be joining (link: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/midway-unveils-hollywood-voices-for-i-stranglehold-i-) were Chow-Yun Fat (of course), Randall Duk Kim (who played the Keymaker in the Matrix), and Arnold Voosloo (who played The Mummy in the titular movies), amongst others. For Chow-Yun Fat himself the team flew over to Hong Kong where he lived and got body scans and voice over sessions with Chow in order to truly recreate Inspector Tequila in game; they also photocopied and then photoshopped a combination of people to create new original characters.
There was this focus on an east west hodgepodge (link: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/07/our-interview-with-the-art-director-of-stranglehold/) sort of mix that John Woo and the others wanted for the game, from eastern clothing styles on the characters to the location of Chicago to even the voice acting being only in English. The goal was to also create levels with the idea that if you haven’t seen it before in a video game, then it would be a good location to use. They decided to photocopy certain environments; which they then created in game with a wide array of destructible items. The idea was that the player would be able to use the destroyed objects to their advantage, like creating makeshift cover; along with making certain arenas able to have objectives completed in multiple different ways. (Link: https://www.psu.com/news/psu-interview-stranglehold/)
They met with John Woo repeatedly in order to get approval of the work that they were doing. He apparently loved the way that the team operated and gave them a lot of creative freedom, though he was also deeply involved with the process. Some of the things that were left on the cutting room floor (according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranglehold_(video_game)#Development) were the involvement of traditional chinese clothing, and apparently story beats such as the export of body parts. But other than that John Woo was happy with what they delivered, often helping produce and flesh out story beats, with him having the final say on pretty much everything (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oscMsnENTAI&t=2s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff). Usually this spells out bad news but in this case it ended up going pretty well.
The promotion for this game, it seems, was pretty good. They had the usual stuff, like Websites that have since gone defunct or belong on MySpace (https://myspace.com/strangleholdgame); Advertising the game in the extra section of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, being promoted alongside Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run, and a collector’s edition which featured the game and the full movie Hard Boiled on disc for PS3 (https://rbr.com/midway-games-delivers-campaign-for-stranglehold/), as well as receiving a Stranglehold branded Xbox 360 Faceplate (https://i.ebayimg.com/thumbs/images/g/7dcAAOSwsiJhFYby/s-l300.jpg), a shot glass (https://www.bonanza.com/items/like/262049959) and more interestingly, a comic which I can’t find.
The only thing I ever saw was a Limited Edition Bonus Disc for Xbox 360 that came with the game which I bought on Ebay for a couple of dollars in order to help make this video.
The thing that popped out to me the most however was their Movie Contest, True to John Woo. Announced in late 2007 (link here: https://rbr.com/midway-games-delivers-campaign-for-stranglehold/), contestants were to make short films that emulated John Woo’s style of filmmaking the most, with the winner getting 25,000 dollars (link here: https://www.gamezone.com/news/midway_announces_stranglehold_s_true_to_john_woo_short_film_contest_on_myspace/), a trip for two to Midway’s Chicago studios to meet the developers, an authentic "Hard Boiled" movie poster autographed by John Woo himself, some mobile phone with service, and a copy of Stranglehold. They would also tape an interview for Spike TV, where they would premiere the short film; They even had a lineup (along with some other games that look and sound mediocre, link here: https://www.awn.com/news/midway-brings-john-woos-stranglehold-more-e3) at E3, which I couldn’t find footage of the event just the trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKDayRrQ0Gs&ab_channel=WhichEntertainment). It was later released to positive reviews, around a 7 to late 7 out of 10 and was a mild success at 1 Million dollars but it was swept under the rug by the likes of an equally short game but with much more triple A budget, Halo 3, amongst other shooters that came out in 2007 (https://techraptor.net/originals/gaming-obscura-john-woos-stranglehold).That and the budget was like 30 Million, the cost of Midway getting way too generous with their money without being smart and also losing their billionaire gaming sugar daddy Sumner Redstone amongst other problems. And honestly? It’s a damn shame cause I thought this game and John Woo deserved more than that. Let’s talk about it shall we?
Plot/Spoilers:
The story begins in the intro of the game, where it opens up to Chicago and Hong Kong separately. The Russian Mafia kidnap a Chinese woman and her daughter in an apartment building in Chicago while at the same time two triad gangsters kidnap and murder a cop in Hong Kong. One Russian gangster knocks the daughter against shelves in the apartment to reveal a picture frame that shows a man holding her mother: this man is Inspector Tequila Yuen, one of the two main characters of Hard Boiled, and the playable character portrayed by the one and only Chow Yun Fat. For the story from here on out, you should expect slow-motion action scenes, Mexican standoffs, betrayals, more slow-motion action scenes, MORE Mexican standoffs, and about 3-5 hours worth of story. What I liked most about the story other than the action (no shit) is just that authenticity the game has with John Woo’s involvement. As you can tell, I basically worship the guy. He directs great action and great story, and to be fair the first one is done pretty well. The story isn’t bad itself, it’s good; but at the same time you can tell it was Americanized, for the Hollywood American gamer guys. Yeah that's the right term. It feels like it sometimes tries too hard to appeal to the West, not in the manner of everything is American. In that way, I mean it’s more so focused on everyone speaks English, it goes to America, it doesn’t really have the feel of John Woo films emotionally, it’s sorta like a worse Hard Boiled: it’s a fun ride and you enjoy yourself with the combat but you don’t come out feeling like anything particular in terms of sadness or goofiness. It’s basically a straight up action flick. I won’t be amazed by the mind bending twists or the feeling of overwhelming sadness of your girlfriend getting shot just as she was about to get eye surgery, it’s more so just an American action film but with John Woo dressing over the American cuisine, though the dressing is actually decently pulled off in my opinion.
Now I don’t know shit about food, but to me it’s good but it’s not personally my tastes to blend it together like that. I would’ve preferred more of a Hong Kong classic feel, because to me the most interesting action is from Hong Kong. If I had the choice to see Chow Yun Fat dive over a table, slide under another one and shoot a dude above him or Steven Segal wildly flailing his arms like an idiot while spraying a machine gun around and surprisingly hitting every enemy he comes across, there’s no comparison. Chow Yun everyday baby! It kind of feels like the two action styles mixed up in a weird way, it’s not totally bad, I like it the way it is. I would’ve just preferred if it was more into Hong Kong then the Yankee Doodle Doo if that makes sense, hell I would’ve loved it if they had a Chinese voice option with English subtitles like the way I watch the movies; though I understand that since some of it takes place in America that they have English as the main thing but I don’t know. I guess it’s just preferences.. So the story isn’t the most captivating but you’re not necessarily here for the story, you’re here to shoot people. And this game delivers that VERY well. So I’m going to talk about the story here, and I’m going to generally spoil it since it’s a short game.
Chapter 1:
It starts in Captain Lee, Tequila’s boss’s, office in Hong Kong where a voice message taunting the police about a missing police officer leads Inspector Tequila to disobey orders to wait for a SWAT team and go to the rendezvous point by himself in Kowloon Square to find out the fate of this cop. After shooting through a bunch of goons that try to ambush him he ends up in Kowloon Square, where he learns that the cop was already killed. The meeting itself turns out to be an ambush.
He makes his way to a nearby bar when he’s confronted with a standoff between him and more triads. When asked who killed the cop, he is told to “Go to Tai-O and ask an I-9”. He survives the stand off and continues to make his way through the market and into the bar where the I-9 Triad and Golden Kane Triad are making a deal for passports. Pop in a cameo from John Woo himself playing the same role he did in Hard Boiled; Tequila gets a drink as the deal continues on. Above the deal; two members of the Golden Kane, one the actual killer of the cop later revealed to be the right hand man to the organization.
Making note of Inspector Tequila’s presence, the right hand man (named Lok) tells the other guy that Tequila should be dead and to take care of the job before he leaves to go to a place called The Mega. A misunderstanding seems to erupt in the deal when Tequila’s presence is known and it goes sour. After a gauntlet shootout in the bar, golden disco boy brings out a rocket launcher of all fucking things to kill Tequila. It fails. It’s learned here that this was a message and that someone's trying to start a war between the Golden Kane triad and the Dragon Claw triad, to which the suited guys were members of the latter, being in a special group called the Imperial 9s, or I-9’s for short. The Golden Kane is led by a guy named Yung whereas the Dragon Claw/I-9 are led by an older man named Wong. After Captain Lee gives him a scolding about causing property damage and warns him not to go to Tai-O, Tequila ignores him and heads straight there.
Chapter 2:
Inspector Tequila later arrives in Tai-O, which turns out to be a fishing village, to ask around about the Imperial Nine stuff they were on about earlier while attempting to coerce the people in the village to talk to him by showing them a picture of the dead cop. One dude snitches about Wong being around only to be shot for it, which brings Tequila to go through the entire village and wipe out the triads. Along the way he destroys a bunch of drug labs, goes through a turret section and THEN blows up a bunch of boats. He sneaks onto a boat nearby, revealed to be Wong’s boat before being caught by undercover cop Jerry who is actually working for Wong.
Tequila meets with Wong where he learns that the reason why Tequila was brought to Wong’s office is because Mr. Wong needs Tequila’s help, no matter the bad blood. As explained, Golden Kane put out the hit on the cop and blamed him to make him look bad. On top of that the Golden Kane is hooking up with the Russian Mafia in Chicago and they want to muscle Wong out of Hong Kong. In order to do that they kidnap Wong’s daughter and granddaughter; Billie and Teko. The daughter is the same one that Tequila was holding in the picture in the intro, leading to the revelation that Tequila was dating her on the downlow against Mr. Wong’s wishes until he found out.
The only reason Wong didn’t send anyone out is because the FBI would bust his ass and the Russian, Zakarov, promised Wong that he would kill Billie and Teko from the footage. He decides it should be Tequila who rescues them, saying that he’s someone the “Cops won’t watch”, which is also wrong considering DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY GUYS THIS ONE MAN HAS KILLED? A LOT. Police murdering suspects isn’t exactly well loved in the police dep….nevermind.
Blaming Wong for taking them from him, Tequila begrudgingly agrees after decking Wong in the face and blows up the docks nearby on orders from Wong because of Golden Kane’s attempted takeover. After Tequila plants the bombs, his superior picks him up on a boat about the usual good cop spiel before Tequila just quits on site, undermining Wong’s point about not being watched because now he JUST QUIT THE FORCE.
The final scene shows a flashback of Tequila and Billie meeting up, with Billie announcing she’s pregnant. He gets excited and proposes that they escape the country on a plane that same night. It then fades into Chapter 3.
Chapter 3:
Tequila arrives at the Mega casino that the big guy was talking about earlier, where Jerry gives him two Desperado looking guitar cases full of goodies and tells him the Golden Kane is meeting up on the top floor. Tequila shoots his way through like three to four floors while Golden Kane sends more guys down to kill him. After shooting his way through more guys, and protecting an entire band while shooting down guys in a difficult but cool as all hell set piece, Yung escapes the casino. It’s learned that he’s planning on leaving for Chicago to look at the Russian’s operations, hoping to move more Heroin that way.
To give him time, Yung leaves Lok, the cop killer, behind to take care of Tequila when he gets to the top floor. Tequila arrives at the top floor only to find Lok with a giant fucking machine gun and attempts to eviscerate Tequila. This however fails as Tequila is not only not eviscerated but he manages to escape with Jerry after Imperial Nines place bombs all around the casino. After jumping off of the casino american action style, Tequila and Jerry go to Chicago to chase after Yung. There was also a cutscene at the end where it shows Tequila at the plane waiting for his girlfriend Billie to arrive when Wong does the honors instead, with Tequila getting the shit kicked out of him by Wong’s guys. That didn’t show up for me on GOG, which I believe is a glitch since it shows up on the regular console version.
Chapter 4:
It skips to the present day again with Yung yelling at his boys on the phone after the attempt on Tequila in the last level has failed. Zakarov, the leader of the Russian Mafia, talks to Yung about his criminal operation at the museum and corrals Yung and the girls over there to look at his operation; while leaving his brother Vlad behind to kill Tequila and Jerry after they appear on the camera feed in the parking garage.
Meanwhile in the parking garage, the gang split up to search for clues and Tequila gets ambushed by a bunch of angry russians. He shoots his way up to the Penthouse only to encounter laser grids, explosives, a helicopter gunship and more angry Russians before running into this level’s boss: VLAD Zakarov. This devolves into a chase sequence involving laser patterns and not getting shot before running into the frustrating boss battle of the level: Vlad on the minigun of the helicopter. After you shoot him and take him down, you find Jerry in a broom closet shot in the shoulder with invitations to the Chicago History museum. Tequila heads off on his own to the museum, leaving Jerry there to take care of his wounds.
Chapter 5:
Tequila arrives at the museum only for some special forces motherfucker to spot him and snitch, causing Zakarov and Yung to get into an argument and blame each other for Tequila killing his brother Vlad. They strike a deal to bring Teko back to Hong Kong, while Billie stays with Zakarov and he brings her back separately. Tequila shows up just in time to crash the party and goes after Zakarov to get to Billie. He goes through Russian Gangsters, Triad Gangsters and Special Security looking gangsters to get to Zakarov and after they get into a battle while ends in Zakarov’s death. Tequila embraces Billie, and it’s learned that she missed the plane in order to keep both Tequila and Teko safe from her father before Tequila reveals her father sent him to rescue her.
Billie freaks out because she knows what’s up and that slimy piece of shit Jerry busts in and starts shooting, mortally injuring her. She tells Tequila that Teko was brought back to Hong Kong by the Golden Kane and being righteously pissed Tequila goes after Jerry. He eventually kills Jerry and picks up his phone which conveniently plays the full video shown against Wong. It turns out Zakarov is also conveniently threatening Wong with blackmail and exposing him as a criminal, making his daughter send him away to jail to keep Teko safe. The whole plan was to either send Wong to jail or get him to step down from leading the Hong Kong Criminal Underworld forever. Wong sent Tequila and Jerry there to have Jerry tie up any loose ends and advantages that Zakarov and the Golden Kane have against him. Wong then ends up conveniently texting Jerry’s phone at that specific moment, with Tequila responding back as Jerry telling Wong that both Tequila and Billie are dead, and that he will handle Teko before name dropping one of John Woo’s most tragic movies. Jerry attempts to kill Tequila one last time before he runs out of bullets and just dies, with Tequila throwing the dead cop’s badge onto Jerry as some sort of final fuck you cause it looks cool.
Chapter 6:
Tequila charges into Yung’s office in Hong Kong to strike a deal with the Golden Kane. Yung thinks that Wong will set up a deal, until Tequila points out that Wong is not honorable and shows him a text conversation proving that Wong was going to try to set up and kill them instead. The deal changes and Yung sets up the old drop spot in Yung’s old neighborhood, the Slums of Kowloon as the chapter select puts it. Tequila arrives in the neighborhood, where Captain Lee calls Tequila and tells him not to get involved with the kidnapping trade going on. Going against his orders, Tequila gives him the “I don’t want my badge back” spiel and fights through the slums in the shortest level in the game possibly.
Yung goes through with the deal when Tequila doesn’t show up on time; which ends up in a standoff between Tequila, a surprised Wong and Yung himself. Yung ends up dead, Wong takes Teko and Tequila shoots his way through them in a cutscene matching the spirit of the movies before chasing after them in a vehicle himself.
Chapter 7:
Tequila chases them back to Wong’s estate, going through hordes of men with throwing knives, rocket launchers and another giant attack helicopter, which after filling it full of bullets conveniently crashes into Wong’s front door. Tequila enters the mansion and finds Wong holding Teko hostage; who promises Tequila that if he takes Teko away forever then everything will be done forever. Not falling for his bullshit but trying to save Teko, he puts down his gun only to get ambushed by goons. Teko escapes via kicking the big bald boy in his balls and running away, and the big bald boy, named Da Pang here, and Wong get caked in bullets before Teko throws Wong over the railing to his death. With both Da Pang and Wong dead, Teko reunites with her father before the police captain freaks out about the paperwork that’ll have to be written up before giving Tequila back his badge. He gives it to his daughter and they walk off to a happy ending.
Gameplay:
The gameplay, the most important and fundamental part of a video game, to me if the story sucks I can at least play the game. And what do I think of the gameplay? It’s a nice, short couple hour romp of shootouts, explosions, more shootouts and explosions. I remember when doing research for this video that In an Ars Technica interview (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/07/our-interview-with-the-art-director-of-stranglehold/) with the game’s art director Jason Kaehler, he said the beta testing for the game led to about 12 hours of gameplay. I assume this comes from playing the game repeatedly to try out new ways because depending on the game difficulty you’re not getting 12 hours in one game, maybe like 4-5 depending. Honestly it depends on the difficulty you play and how often you die, for me it was like three to four hours of basically you going through little hallways and arenas full of interactables you can use to your advantage as you shoot your way through hordes of goons with guns waiting to kill you as fast as possible. It’s not necessarily the gameplay loop that’s the unique thing about it, you can go shoot people in any game with slow motion and it’ll still feel fun, like: Max Payne, Total Overdose, F.E.A.R.; like it’s almost always fun; they have different names for it but it’s the same concept.
They call this games version of slow motion Tequila Time and of course you can dive, slide and dodge bullets as you do cool stunts and kill people. In game you can usually just activate it by pressing the left mouse (or any other controller corresponding buttons) button (doing it on it’s own without any special moves) or alternatively if you press the spacebar you can do a dive and sometimes it automatically activates for you when there are goons around to shoot. I much prefer the diving because it looks fuckin cool as shit though when you fall on the ground and you start rolling everywhere it feels a tad awkward especially with 5,000 dudes shooting you and sometimes when there’s Tequila Time you end up sliding over everything which is funny but sometimes awkward depending on the situation.
There’s also this cool move I like to do where I use Tequila’s legs to boost himself off of a wall to do another dive. You can also crouch to take cover which will help in certain situations, you can kick up certain tables to add cover or you can press a certain button to take cover behind a wall, where you can peek out and shoot people. I didn’t really use these much and honestly I forgot about it, but I’m glad it’s there as it adds a nice thing of detail. The interactables I told you about are usually poles, railings, movable carts, chandeliers and the like, which usually helps you dodge stuff in slow-motion or alternatively depending on the railing it brings you to different places depending on the map that leads to collectible paper cranes, which fill up your special ability meter, called here the Tequila bomb.
What’s on the special ability meter? Four separate abilities: One is the healing option which I used way more than any other ability; another one is the ability to do a slow motion aiming thing, a reference to Tequila’s tense shots in Hard Boiled, where you zoom in to your gun and when you shoot it the camera follows the bullet to the guy your trying to shoot. My favorite place to shoot? The balls. Heh. But thanks to the engine and all of the good stuff it provides you could shoot almost anywhere and it provides a cool little animation pretty much.
The third ability is the ability I use the second most, something I call the “Murder everyone in your way” ability. Basically using this brings the camera over your shoulder and you shoot your way through everything in your path for a limited time, basically becoming invincible and with unlimited ammo. The fourth ability is pretty cool, it has Tequila spin around, with the trademark Doves flying out, and kill I guess everyone in your room but I didn’t find myself using that much because I like to know how many people are in the room and just because I like the action. Now that you know all of that stuff? You’re basically set.
You can use these abilities to murder everyone in your environment, but on top of that you can also shoot certain things in your environment that kills people immediately; for example: barrels or propane tanks (no shit), signs, suspiciously placed wooden things that hold giant boulders, etc. It’s all marked by giant white flashing lights and sometimes shooting this stuff is essential to get to the next place. Speaking of they used this Massive D engine pretty effectively, it’s not only this stuff that’s able to be destroyed but basically the whole environment is able to be taken down by gunfire, destroyed into bits and pieces, statues toppling over, it’s amazing what they did to make stuff destructible. This destructibility lends to the overall pace and difficulty of the game, which you always have to be on the move as if you stay in one place for too long the bullets will cut you to ribbons.
Staying on the move is essential because if you play this game on normal or higher you will get fucked up, using up most of your bullets (in which you’ll essentially have no ammo unless you go up to someone and smack em in the face and take their guns). The worst example I remember is the Museum level, where you get ambushed by a bunch of special forces looking guys with guns and the destructibility of the cover means you won’t be using much cover for long, especially since they’ll be spawning everywhere. I’d say the most difficult levels in the game for me personally would be the American levels, being the Penthouse and the Museum. The museum I just told you about but on the penthouse? It’s all sorta normal until you actually get in the penthouse itself, which will be rigged with 50,000 fucking lasers that will basically fucking kill instantly, with the only way to destroy the lasers would be through shooting the shiny white destructible stuff nearby.
What will you be shooting with? Guns obviously but the guns here are pretty standard, nothing unique or special but in the environment it makes sense: the usual pistols which you can dual-wield, shotguns, submachine guns (my favorite), assault rifle, a SAW in the later levels, a rocket launcher, and in secret and/or special locations a golden pistol which immediately kill almost anyone except bosses. Grenades were introduced in later levels but I didn’t exactly use them much either. All of this stylistic killing is in service for one thing: Stars which will be used to rate your style level at the end of the mission which humorously calculates the damage done to the environment. What do these stars do? Not really much except an arbitrary rating and I guess the ability to unlock a bunch of stuff later on in the shop. But the more stylistic the kill the more stars you get which means the better the rank.
Style is definitely in the game, there’s a lot of stylistic and special situations for Tequila to get into: again I mentioned the museum and the penthouse but in the second level you get into blowing up boats and shooting people on a turret and in the third level, Tai-O, you get guitar cases for the first couple of floors to drop in special arenas that help refill health and ammo, delivering a homage to old action alike. Before I stop I talk about something I mentioned in the plot spoilers: standoffs. Harkening back to the old action movies, in game Tequila gets ambushed numerous times by a bunch of angry gangsters in a giant group. This little minigame has you swing over to each person in the group in slow motion and dodge left or right while aiming your cursor over to the guy so you can wipe him out before moving to the others. Depending on the mission and environment you can use certain interactables to blow them up while you do it. I know realistically it would just be easier for everyone to shoot you but I guess you're super fast in game lore wise...until the later levels. The later levels have you do the dodging and shooting but with less slow motion, which makes it increasingly harder to kill and believe me getting shot in this game mode means taking a chunk of your health. Take too long and they’ll just skip to the next guy. Sometimes they make you continue the shooting until everyone's dead, most times they don’t. Overall I like the mechanic, it breaks up the pace and makes the game feel like a more interactive Max Payne.
And now that I’m done ranting about all of this stuff? My overall summary is yeah, the gameplay feels great in my opinion. Some of the footage has me sucking at it but I’m not too used to mouse and keyboard but other than that? There’s not really much I can complain about really except again it's a short single player which I would’ve preferred to be a bit longer and more in depth and sometimes the game feels kind of awkward? Oh and normal difficulty just switches up into fucking insane, which I can’t say it doesn’t feel fair I’m just a filthy fucking casual and I like having a more chill experience. Other than that, gameplay wise it’s perfectly great and I enjoy the fact it exists.
Atmosphere:
The first thing that I’m gonna be talking about here is the soundtrack. The soundtrack is pretty good, though you can’t really find the entire score on Youtube I managed to find a couple of pieces here and there. Each one of them serves the fighting going on in the background very well, escalating gun battles to the likes of an actual John Woo flick.
Apparently, according to IGN (https://www.ign.com/articles/2007/08/24/the-music-of-stranglehold-the-symphony-of-six) back when they were somewhat decent, John Woo enlisted about six composers to help compose the soundtrack. For what they did I thought they did a pretty good job translating the music into a good game soundtrack, though I think my favorite piece in there is the Jazz influenced one that slams the most. They have this little piece harkening back to Tequila’s love of being a musician and the Jazz Influence in Hard Boiled and honestly? To me this sorta stuff is the perfect track. In the article by IGN the guys making the music were told to stay away from the Jazz inspired score of Hard Boiled and...I mean they did good with what they did, they got some good drum action, some electronic stuff, etc.. I can’t complain really, though I did kinda wince when they said they took more influence from the newer Americanized John Woo style. Here are some playlists I found of the soundtrack on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL11FE86F12513E7DC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kckXCRQsf2c&list=PLZxdl25_WLrc50uG0MMyJCv2mnWx0NmCH&index=1&ab_channel=neruto
You’ll be hearing these tracks a lot, though I was never bothered by it as they actually fit pretty well, as it all blends into the background most of the time cause you’re so focused on actually shooting people then not. Though I did wish they went into Jazz a tad bit more than one track on the bonus menu and the actually legitimately tight Jazz piece they did in the Casino shootout where you protect the band.
They also said that they were trying to enhance the nuance of certain vibes and they did to a certain extent, only the action really. They had more somber tracks for more emotional elements but they don’t make me “feel”, like something in The Killer or Bullet in the Head.
The sound design itself is pretty tight too, the sound of bullets whizzing right by as you dodge it in slo-motion is tight.
While I was doing research and Watching the behind the scenes video, some of the notable things that stuck out to me personally was the engineers acquiring a bunch of breakable items in the studio and just smashing it in front of a microphone as well as having the instrument players during the jazz band section randomly collapse over certain parts of the composition, it’s little things like that that make me appreciate the sound even more.
I can’t complain about the sound design, nor say anything bad about it. They did an excellent job, from the wooden crates breaking to the sound you make when you collect paper cranes to the sound of just shooting someone in the dick. Yeah, no complaint about the sound at all. The only thing I would have to complain about is the voice acting.
Ahhhh the voice acting. What do I say about this? It's not awful, and I understand why they made everyone speak English, with the whole Americanized action thing they got going on with the game. But I’m mixed on it. On a personal preference, I felt since that the original movie was in Chinese that this game should allow Chinese with subtitles. There’s no subtitles to this game at all and the voices are only in English from what I can tell.
Another reason why I don’t care about the whole English thing too much is because whereas the voice acting is fine on the actor’s part, some of the delivery is…yeah. Especially in the first cutscene oh fucking Jesus is it bad. There’s no tension, no nothing. In these scenes they just sound like they don’t care. And I know that English isn’t Chow Yun Fat’s first language, again I’m not hating on him for that. I think he did well for the rest of the game considering. But dear god the first cutscene is laughably bad. Everyone else did an ok job, especially Russell Wong as Yung, Arnold Voosloo as Damon Zakarov and Randall Duk Kim as Wong, which hot damn I like his voice. He sounds like what an evil Triad boss sounds like; otherwise it sounds goofy and considering not too many people took gaming seriously I guess I'm not too surprised by that delivery.
I also understand that it would feel weird if everyone was speaking Chinese when they went to America but maybe a blend of it would work? Or maybe Tequila and Jerry speak a tad bit of English when they go to America for the two scenes? I don’t know, I can understand why they didn’t do Chinese but I would’ve liked an option to be honest, but for some reason according to a comment in the GGManlives video the guys at Tiger Hill required English, I don’t know why if it’s true but ok I guess. Subtitles I felt like they should’ve just kept in because of people who need it.
The Visuals, what can I say? For 2006 they’re pretty good in my opinion. I mean of course it’s 2006 no shit nowadays games like Ghost of Tsushima and the upcoming Cyberpunk and whatever look better who cares. I like the style they’re going for this game, in the behind the scenes video they talked about how they tried to emulate the film that the movie was made on for a specific movie style and I think they optimized the Psi-Ops engine pretty damn well to be honest. It looks pretty damn good if you play it on GOG with HD, but you’ll still get your usual character models from 2006; albeit with really unique story characters (like Lok) and less so the actual gangsters. Even then though they actually coded the game where it mixes and matches the parts of the goons that you shoot to give them different clothes and faces. You’ll still see a lot of the same clothing and faces but not as often which is cool. (Link here: https://gamedumpuk.wixsite.com/dump/post/john-woo-s-stranglehold)
Now, the best part of the visuals is the environments, especially with the destructibility fueled by an Unreal 3 modification called Massive D (heh) and something they called Woo Glue, which would hold the environments together and allow this destruction on almost everything on every level. You shoot a table on one end it’s destroyed in that one end and doesn’t fuck up the entire table. I can’t say much else about graphics wise but again I think the destructibility is actually a pretty impressive feat. I mean sure there are games from the past who also had destructibility but I don’t know, I actually like it a lot. It’s pretty good. The whole tan when you go into slow-motion I have no opinions but the slow-motion itself, the bullets flying by with the rings attached to it is also pretty cool.
Multiplayer/Bonus Stuff/Settings:
They also developed a multiplayer component to the game, but it’s not really active anymore, and to be honest I highly doubt it was active much to begin with but from what I saw it was the standard third person multiplayer thing but slow motion and interactive environments. If you were to try to boot up the multiplayer to make it work right now it wouldn’t. Servers are shut down, if you’re genuinely curious you can try to watch a video of the multiplayer but I find the ham-fisted multiplayer aspects of old games to be kind of boring, like the multiplayer for Condemned 2: Bloodshot as an example. I think it looks interesting but I feel like Rockstar did this better with Max Payne 3’s multiplayer, however keep in mind it was probably difficult as all hell trying to match up mechanics like these while attempting to make a tight multiplayer experience at the same time. Am I saying this multiplayer is bad? No. But to me it looks average.
So there’s nothing really of note multiplayer wise, but connecting it to the multiplayer as I said earlier, there is an area where you can buy multiplayer characters using the points you earn from a single player to get it. Except it’s not worth getting them so don’t waste your time just get all the bonus art and videos and stuff. The art is just the artwork for Stranglehold mind you but the videos are….interesting. One of these videos is a gameplay concept using the restaurant map from the first mission but using the old Psi-Ops models, and another is watching a guy show you how to make an Origami crane, facial animation stuff, etc. Some of the other bonus stuff there includes trailers for Wheelman and Blacksite: Area 51; and before I move on I just wanted to say I find this trailer promotion inside of other games to be fascinating, a thing of it’s era I guess but still heavily fascinating.
Other Stuff:
See now I’m going to go into more personal stuff so if you were just looking for a review of the game then yeah there it is. However I wanna go on about WHY I LOVE this game, even if it’s kind of average. See this all sort of starts when I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as a kid, Armageddon was basically my favorite fighting game I could get my hands on. I played that game nonstop, though I only popped in a couple of times in the bonus features. Specifically, the bonus trailers like Stranglehold have on It’s bonus menu. This game had Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run and John Woo’s Stranglehold and I was interested in the second one...except for the fact I couldn’t play it cause it was on next-gen consoles. I didn’t have money as a kid for that so I just forgot about it until WAY later.
I only got into John Woo films much recently, when I was bored one day searching through the internet I heard of a movie called Hard Boiled. Through just curiosity I found a full movie rip on Youtube (surprisingly enough) and I watched it. I loved it; it’s cinematography, the chaotic violent shooting mixed in with the thrilling plot and it’s tense soundtrack pulled me in and I was enamored with it. I thought the two main leads were great, and when I learned Chow-Yun Fat and Tony Leung starred in other John Woo flicks I decided to give all of his Chinese action movies a shot. Two of them, The Killer and Bullet in the Head, along with this one are amongst my favorite movies of all time. The Killer and Bullet in the Head were much more dramatic, sad, and at the time I was (and still am) a sad, depressed kid who enjoyed movies. These two movies are movies I consider to be art. Even the other movies that people don’t really think about like Heroes Shed No Tears, and Just Heroes are fantastic though Just Heroes really needs to go back into reprint. A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2 are fantastic, though the second one is my favorite for it’s really weird parts and it’s more so over the top action violence. Once A Thief is good too but it was my least favorite, though it’s commendable considering John Woo wanted to take a more lighthearted approach. I haven’t watched too many of his american flicks except Hard Target (which is good only because of John Woo’s direction) and Face Off, which is good schlocky fun but not really what I’m looking for. But I respect it, I respect what he does. And honestly I know he’s moved onto Historical Dramas and such, which I respect 100 percent but I would love to see John Woo do a couple more of these action flicks. This brings me into the next point.
I have this tendency to know about video games but not understand them. I heard of Stranglehold a couple of times here and there but I never really KNEW about it until I started my John Woo fanboy phase. When I learned he made a video game I shit my pants and went out and got a copy. In fact I loved it so much I got TWO Copies; and then I loved it so much that I got it on GOG, which unless you have an older console is the best place to get it nowadays as it’s only ten dollars, and honestly minus like two glitches on the fourth chapter it’s a fantastic looking and feeling game. Even though I think the game itself is sorta average I think the John Woo stuff brings it up, though I’ll admit I feel disappointed about the whole American influence. This American influence would later seep into the game’s rumored, then confirmed, then cancelled sequel: John Woo’s Gun Runner.
John Woo’s Gun Runner was effectively supposed to be a cover shooter by Midway which had Inspector Tequila and a character played by action star Vin Diesel, rumored to be his character from another Midway game: Wheelman. The leaked prototype footage would see them in Prague shooting through what I assume to be terrorists in a hotel in Prague, along with car chases and all sorts of high octane American actiony shit. Which in a way would sort of make sense, as to me Hard Boiled felt like the best action movie of all time just not necessarily the emotional stuff. Which to me is what a lot of American action movies are, not really a lot of good emotion just blowing stuff up, which is ok. And of course there’s going to be exceptions, and I’m not saying Hard Boiled was a dumbed down American action flick in Chinese form. To me Hard Boiled is the closest to the best action film (other than say Die Hard and the etc.), John Woo mastered what no one else did and did it beautifully, I remember at one point hearing a quote about how his style was moreso a drama with guns, a ballet of murder and honestly? I love it. But I also see why this game was more so gearing towards the American action crowd. In all honesty, I wish I could’ve seen Tiger Hill Entertainment work on Gun Runner, with the care put into the action in Stranglehold and hopefully changing it from a Gears cover shooter type and more so pushing the Slow-Motion action thing in it’s own way. At this point even if it’s not a game I would’ve loved to see a Gun Runner graphic novel and maybe repackage Hard Boiled, Stranglehold and Gun Runner into one complete box set trilogy of sorts. Hell I would’ve loved to see what he would’ve done with his game company in general, though later on Midway Games cancelled the project and switched to some other game called Gun Runner, dropping the John Woo aspect before just liquidating everything and closing shop. As for Tiger Hill, After this game they attempted to make game’s named ShadowClan, John Carpenter’s Psychopath, Clive Barker’s Demonik, amongst a couple of others before John Woo eventually decided to shift his focus onto films again. Which I’ll be honest it’s a shame, as I would’ve at least loved to have seen Clive Barker’s Demonik as well but it is what it is. He’s moved on and sometimes things just don’t work out. Also they were supposed to do a Stranglehold movie, which at first didn’t make sense until I did more research (https://techraptor.net/originals/gaming-obscura-john-woos-stranglehold) and learned that Director Stephen Fung was supposed to direct the movie and that the movie itself would’ve been a prequel with a younger Inspector Tequila. At this point however, I don’t know if I would want the movie just because of time eroding the prospect. The last thing I would want is a bad prequel like Carlito: The Rise of Power or a movie like The Irishman where they CGI’d the characters to make them look younger.
Where is John Woo today? Well since then he’s done as I said historical dramas, one action movie he released called The Manhunt (no relation to Rockstar) which I wanna look up and watch one day, see what it’s like. I know he also released a graphic novel around the same time as Stranglehold debuted called Seven Brothers and a game called Bloodstroke for the ios and android which I haven’t touched. Regardless of where he’s at now, his past has influenced so much greatness, so many movies and so many video games. I mean christ he’s influenced Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, The Wachowskis with the Matrix, I can’t list everything but it goes on. For video games it would be obviously the Max Payne series, F.E.A.R., I’m sure there’s so much stuff I can go on about but I can’t because then this would be an essay on John Woo with Bullet Time and not a game review and my overall thoughts on everything around it. But to make a final point of that, maybe John Woo didn’t invent his style, but he sure as hell perfected it.
Note: This was an old script I was making for a youtube review channel years ago, I just don't like editing or doing youtube stuff so I figured I'd edit a bit, spruce it up and remove video references. I still believe the same stuff but if worded weirdly my apologies. I played this originally from GOG but watched a buddy replay it on PS3 so I figured I'd throw my thoughts on here. Here are some extra behind the scenes footage as well from the bonus disc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZMGHj3s0AI&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBVQYBj0A9o&t=77s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCeKYRYLLBs&t=1s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWcEg2a8wM0&t=5s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD3t63Ty-0s&t=5s&ab_channel=G15ExtraStuff
A must-play for John Woo fans. Also, the PS3 collector's edition includes the full movie Hard Boiled on Blu-Ray, which is both Woo's masterpiece and surprisingly hard to find find a great-quality copy of in the U.S. Worth a purchase for the movie alone. Max Payne 3 pretty much does everything this game does well but does it better, so it can feel a little obsolete in direct comparison, but it is fun for a single playthrough at least.
Not great, with wonky context sensitive mechanics and obnoxious bullet sponge bosses, but generally a fun time. Better than Max Payne 3, even with its faults.
Reprising the role, Chow Yun-fat is Inspector Tequila and he rocks. The plot is nothing special (pretty funny though). The chief of police or whatever he is comes very, very close to saying "give me your gun and your badge".
The game features bullet time and a style meter which fills up your Cop Mana which is needed to unleash Tequila's powers on the poor goons gunning for you. Pretty cool.
I gotta say, the game looks nice for it's age. The visuals are clean and the character models are fairly expressive when you're shooting them in the eye or crotch.
The first two and very last levels drag this game down pretty bad since there are only seven levels total. The game hits a good stride in the middle with cool set pieces and nicely detailed interiors which are impressively destructible, especially the penthouse level. The second mission sucks hard, I mean damn.
Anyway, I would like to give this game a higher rating basically for it's engine alone, but it can get too repetitive. Sure, it's all about guns, but gunning down wave after wave of guys can only hold my attention for so long without something else going on.
Decent fun, OK PC port from GOG. Worth it to go back to? Only if it's really cheap.
The game features bullet time and a style meter which fills up your Cop Mana which is needed to unleash Tequila's powers on the poor goons gunning for you. Pretty cool.
I gotta say, the game looks nice for it's age. The visuals are clean and the character models are fairly expressive when you're shooting them in the eye or crotch.
The first two and very last levels drag this game down pretty bad since there are only seven levels total. The game hits a good stride in the middle with cool set pieces and nicely detailed interiors which are impressively destructible, especially the penthouse level. The second mission sucks hard, I mean damn.
Anyway, I would like to give this game a higher rating basically for it's engine alone, but it can get too repetitive. Sure, it's all about guns, but gunning down wave after wave of guys can only hold my attention for so long without something else going on.
Decent fun, OK PC port from GOG. Worth it to go back to? Only if it's really cheap.
It's a bit rough but man this game is fun as hell. The slow-mo is unbeatable.
jank and fun, jfank
Ehhh
The HD era of gaming was a rough one, especially in the beginning years. Games had to transition from dated aging hardware and design choices that had to work around that and open up more. Bigger levels, better AI, better graphics, and just overall more content. Stranglehold was a AAA blockbuster of a game due to the names attached to the game and Midway’s push to let celebrities in on this new HD era of gaming to bring Hollywood-style action to consoles.
Stranglehold is a successor to John Woo’s Hardboiled Hong Kong cop action movie from the ’90s starring Chow Yun Fat. Both star in this game and Chow reprises his role as Inspector Tequila. I will say that the story is really stupid and this has a lot to do with the 4-hour run time of the game. It’s incredibly short unless you die a million times which can be possible. The story is something lame and typical. Tequila’s daughter and ex-girlfriend get captured and he gets stuck in the middle of two rival Hong Kong gangs, the I-9s and the Dragon Claws. One is new blood and one wants the “old ways” back and Tequila’s daughter is the bargaining chip to get the police off their back. The voice acting is pretty bad, even Chow’s acting is kind of phoned in. The main star of the game is the gameplay, however.
I remember when this game came out it was pretty impressive on a technical level. We finally got an unofficial new Max Payne game. I say that because the entire game is incredibly shallow gameplay-wise. You get “Tequila Time” which lets Chow use bullet-time just like in Max Payne. There’s a meter and everything. However, the difference here is using your environments as well. Certain objects like rails, tables, and carts will have a white line on them if you can mount them. This activates Tequila Time automatically but also gives you a score ranking and boosts your ability gauge. That’s as deep as this game goes. I’m not joking either. You unlock abilities during the first few levels. These allow you to sacrifice one of the four-bar to heal, use a bullet cam that does extra damage, a rampage mode that is a longer Tequila Time, and the last one takes four bars and eliminates all enemies in the area. These actually came in really handy for the most part. The bullet cam ability was great during boss fights as a few of these and they were done.
The issue with all of this is the level design. It’s just too cramped and too small. After the first level the rails become too short, the objects are scattered everywhere, and while the destructible environments are nice, the tables can be destroyed that you need as well. Because of this, I got tired of constantly finding small objects to hop on and off of. The novelty wears off after the first level anyways. I just manually activated my bullet time and ran around shooting everyone in sight. There is a cover system, but it’s a little stuff and is kind of useless in this kind of a game where enemies are designed to come at you in every direction, and because of hit you can’t really hide. So, that essentially makes the ability to rack up your ability gauge and score meter mostly pointless because it’s a chore constantly finding objects to ride on.
When it comes to the actual shooting it’s fine. It works. You get all of your typical weapons. Pistols, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, and heavy machine guns plus grenades. The game is very arcade-like and every enemy has the same amount of hit points. A few shots take them down. There are trigger points to kill enemies with the environment but these are forgotten about mostly after the first couple of levels. As for the design outside of that, it’s actually still last-gen. Enemies pop out of open doors that lead to nowhere, cramped level design, and not to mention that every level looks really bland and boring.
Overall, this was a fun weekend rental and nothing more. It had a lot of Hollywood attached to it but didn’t feel truly next-gen like Gears of War or Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter did at the time. Stranglehold has one foot in the sixth generation door and it shows. The lame story, cramped level design, half-baked “object riding” idea, and the overall generic arcade feeling are very forgettable, but still a fun evening.
Stranglehold is a successor to John Woo’s Hardboiled Hong Kong cop action movie from the ’90s starring Chow Yun Fat. Both star in this game and Chow reprises his role as Inspector Tequila. I will say that the story is really stupid and this has a lot to do with the 4-hour run time of the game. It’s incredibly short unless you die a million times which can be possible. The story is something lame and typical. Tequila’s daughter and ex-girlfriend get captured and he gets stuck in the middle of two rival Hong Kong gangs, the I-9s and the Dragon Claws. One is new blood and one wants the “old ways” back and Tequila’s daughter is the bargaining chip to get the police off their back. The voice acting is pretty bad, even Chow’s acting is kind of phoned in. The main star of the game is the gameplay, however.
I remember when this game came out it was pretty impressive on a technical level. We finally got an unofficial new Max Payne game. I say that because the entire game is incredibly shallow gameplay-wise. You get “Tequila Time” which lets Chow use bullet-time just like in Max Payne. There’s a meter and everything. However, the difference here is using your environments as well. Certain objects like rails, tables, and carts will have a white line on them if you can mount them. This activates Tequila Time automatically but also gives you a score ranking and boosts your ability gauge. That’s as deep as this game goes. I’m not joking either. You unlock abilities during the first few levels. These allow you to sacrifice one of the four-bar to heal, use a bullet cam that does extra damage, a rampage mode that is a longer Tequila Time, and the last one takes four bars and eliminates all enemies in the area. These actually came in really handy for the most part. The bullet cam ability was great during boss fights as a few of these and they were done.
The issue with all of this is the level design. It’s just too cramped and too small. After the first level the rails become too short, the objects are scattered everywhere, and while the destructible environments are nice, the tables can be destroyed that you need as well. Because of this, I got tired of constantly finding small objects to hop on and off of. The novelty wears off after the first level anyways. I just manually activated my bullet time and ran around shooting everyone in sight. There is a cover system, but it’s a little stuff and is kind of useless in this kind of a game where enemies are designed to come at you in every direction, and because of hit you can’t really hide. So, that essentially makes the ability to rack up your ability gauge and score meter mostly pointless because it’s a chore constantly finding objects to ride on.
When it comes to the actual shooting it’s fine. It works. You get all of your typical weapons. Pistols, sub-machine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, and heavy machine guns plus grenades. The game is very arcade-like and every enemy has the same amount of hit points. A few shots take them down. There are trigger points to kill enemies with the environment but these are forgotten about mostly after the first couple of levels. As for the design outside of that, it’s actually still last-gen. Enemies pop out of open doors that lead to nowhere, cramped level design, and not to mention that every level looks really bland and boring.
Overall, this was a fun weekend rental and nothing more. It had a lot of Hollywood attached to it but didn’t feel truly next-gen like Gears of War or Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter did at the time. Stranglehold has one foot in the sixth generation door and it shows. The lame story, cramped level design, half-baked “object riding” idea, and the overall generic arcade feeling are very forgettable, but still a fun evening.
Tremendamente divertido
So damn underrated
A Poundland Max Payne game, but pretty well executed none the less. The gunplay is good fun and the level design, at least early in the game, is good enough to create some interesting shootouts.
Unfortunately the game completely implodes on itself from the halfway mark and turns into an absolute slog to get through, which makes it a very hard recommendation nowadays.
Unfortunately the game completely implodes on itself from the halfway mark and turns into an absolute slog to get through, which makes it a very hard recommendation nowadays.
We took Midway for granted, we really did.
While this didn't remind me why games are great quite as much as Chicago studio's previous game Psi-Ops; it is nonetheless a rip-roaring good time that put spectacle and action movie power fantasy before all else. The rag doll physics, the destructible uhhhh everything, the bullet time - it's everything you'd want from a 'be in the movie' type of shooter.
For the most part, the game's simplicity is tremendously charming. There isn't much to the gameplay but the levels are well designed enough, with enough contraptions to send your enemies flying through, that you won't really care.
Even with a relatively short run-time, the boredom does start to set in in the final third as bullet spongey enemies and a lack of fresh objectives take their toll.
While this didn't remind me why games are great quite as much as Chicago studio's previous game Psi-Ops; it is nonetheless a rip-roaring good time that put spectacle and action movie power fantasy before all else. The rag doll physics, the destructible uhhhh everything, the bullet time - it's everything you'd want from a 'be in the movie' type of shooter.
For the most part, the game's simplicity is tremendously charming. There isn't much to the gameplay but the levels are well designed enough, with enough contraptions to send your enemies flying through, that you won't really care.
Even with a relatively short run-time, the boredom does start to set in in the final third as bullet spongey enemies and a lack of fresh objectives take their toll.
endless fun slow mo dodging and sliding over tables and shit it’s JUST like a real john woo movie i loved it
Finish stranglehold really good game, a game from it's own time era tho, boss fight are mid basically just bullet sponges lmao, and story is B-tier action film but damn the gameplay and action is fun as fuck the environment usage is really something else (gameplay is not as snappy or responsive as max payne tho) say 7/10. highly recomment it
Pretty fun
JOHN WOO BABYYYYY
Solid, fun shooter with fantastic shooting mechanics, but ultimately held down by a sub par engine, awful bosses, and some levels that are just completely awful.
I'm a huge John Woo fan as well as Max Payne fan, with the entire A Better Tomorrow series being in my favorites along with Hard Boiled. I came into this expecting something that plays akin to Woo films, and for the most part, they do. The shooting itself is fantastic and snappy, but the interactions such as jumping on rails etc feel really spacey and unresponsive. The bosses, all of them, are awful, and a terrible edition to the game no matter how you look at it. I really have no clue why they felt the need to shove them into the game, but here we are.
If you're a fan of Woo or Max Payne, this game is sure to entertain you.
I'm a huge John Woo fan as well as Max Payne fan, with the entire A Better Tomorrow series being in my favorites along with Hard Boiled. I came into this expecting something that plays akin to Woo films, and for the most part, they do. The shooting itself is fantastic and snappy, but the interactions such as jumping on rails etc feel really spacey and unresponsive. The bosses, all of them, are awful, and a terrible edition to the game no matter how you look at it. I really have no clue why they felt the need to shove them into the game, but here we are.
If you're a fan of Woo or Max Payne, this game is sure to entertain you.
Pasa el segundo nivel lo más rápido que puedas y juégalo en pc para más placer.
https://www.gog.com/en/game/stranglehold
https://www.gog.com/en/game/stranglehold
I remember the slow-mo being really fun.
E QUE SE FODA A LUDONARRATIVA
If you've ever watched Hard Boiled or any of Chow Yun-fat's classic action thrillers, this is basically that but in video game form. There's tons of slow motion bullet time to hammer home just how badass you are as you pick off waves of thugs, and there are tons of banisters and chandeliers for you to do cool trick shots off of. There's even a level where you can belly flop onto a moving cart to replicate the classic scene from Hard Boiled while mowing down your foes. Anyways, this is a short but sweet hidden gem and is most definitely not perfect (boss fights can be pretty easily cheesed, enemies can be a bit stubborn to die at times, physics can be a bit strange, etc), but it's classic distilled John Woo with over the top violence and tons of guns and explosions, and if you're a fan of goofy and wild gun fu, this is absolutely a must play.
Delicious playable Woo kino. I wish there were Cantonese voices and a sequel but we can’t have everything
It's tequila time, baby.
Pues muy buen juego de acción es un no parar de disparos y muerte, es como Max Payne pero con John Woo de prota que los escenarios sean destructibles y puedas interactuar con el es un puntazo.
This review contains spoilers
The game is super repetitive, the way they increase difficulty later in the game is make enemies bullet sponges, bosses are also bullet sponges but you can tell they love John Woo movies and tried to make something faithful to them. It would however feel more authentic in Cantonese. The comparisons to Max Payne are inevitable but the way you can move on railings and swing from chandeliers etc. and the special abilities differentiate the gameplay.
It's too bad the coolest level comes fairly early where you go in a restaurant carrying guitar cases and a jazz band plays while you have a shoot-out. After that it feels like a bit of a slog.
Recommended for John Woo fans.
It's too bad the coolest level comes fairly early where you go in a restaurant carrying guitar cases and a jazz band plays while you have a shoot-out. After that it feels like a bit of a slog.
Recommended for John Woo fans.