John Woo's Hard Boiled is a phenomenal action film with masterfully choreographed action sequences, engaging and fun characters, and a unique dreamlike atmosphere. The idea of making a video game sequel to it, then, sounds ridiculous only on a surface level. All of these elements, at least in theory, threaten to make something that's at least interesting. That's exactly where Stranglehold comes in, the self-purported sequel to the seminal action film, developed by Midway Chicago with Woo's blessing and involvement. Does the American developer do the Hong Kong film justice? I don't think so, but that doesn't mean it's entirely worthless either.
Stranglehold's biggest boon is the game design, which allows you to do all kinds of cool moves. Diving, flipping, and even carting around the levels is fun on a primal level and for the most part the level design accommodates for that. It typically doesn't restrict you without some sort of point (there's an entire boss fight where they force you to work around a constrained arena, which is fun) and it's surprisingly challenging. Tequila Time (which is just a fancy name for bullet time), isn't just a get out of jail free card for damage, but an actual mechanic that must be learned. Treating it like a gimmick will result in death more often than not. The special moves are also quite fun, whether it be a berserk mode, a Sniper Elite-style instakill sniper mode, or a screen-clearing bullet dance. The gameplay isn't really anything special, by this point two Max Payne games had released and none of the concepts Stranglehold introduces feel fresh or unique, but they are largely well executed and its hard to complain too much when I'm sliding towards a group of enemies on a food cart. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the game's second level has to be one of the worst pacing killers in gaming history. The first level begins as the perfect tutorial, only for the second level to turn into an extremely tedious, overly long and poorly designed hunt for drug tables that of course, culminates in an overly long, unchallenging, and dull turret section. It's everything that the 7th generation of gaming is often unfairly stereotyped as, brought together into one level. Thankfully after that the rest of the game is largely smooth sailing, but it still suffers from flaws such as difficulty spikes and bullet-sponge boss fights that are largely uninteresting. Nevertheless, it does at least generally capture what it would be like to play through a John Woo film, and it deserves some commendation for that.
While Stranglehold is often quite fun, that's not what makes it a disappointing sequel to Hard Boiled. Rather, Stranglehold on a narrative level feels entirely disconnected from it. That's not to say the game needed to be a direct sequel to the film, but rather that it should have had anything to do with it at all. While you do indeed play as Inspector Tequila and the main antagonist is the father of the film's antagonist, that's where the similarities end. Stranglehold's scenario feels like you could have thrown any character ensemble in and it would be the exact same, just with Chow Yun-fat at the lead. There's none of the fun character dynamics or memorable heroes and villains of the original film and everything feels particularly stock. Viewed on its own terms, it's not exactly exciting either, feeling like any generic action film with no memorable characters, narrative stakes, or creative scenario writing. Yung Gi is sort of a fun character, and Tequila occasionally has some funny quips, but it doesn't carry any of what made Hard Boiled not just fun, but narratively gripping.
The presentation is sort of hit or miss, carrying many appealing aspects but once again failing to capture the atmosphere of Hard Boiled. Hard Boiled was a dreamlike, jazz-infused, diffused vision of Hong Kong which Stranglehold completely fails to capture without offering up a unique atmosphere of its own. It feels disappointingly contemporary, not offering any unique elements of the late-2000s. In essence, it lacks atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it always looks totally uninspired. The casino level has some fairly nice art direction across the board but for the most part the rest of the game is mostly generic aesthetically. Grey corridors, bloom-laced beaches, none of which look bad necessarily but fail to make an impression. Graphically speaking I feel Stranglehold is simultaneously quite impressive while also looking very behind the curve. The game looks very flat, and that's because the lighting is quite poor. Areas simply lack proper shadowing and look washed out and lifeless. Facial animation is actually very expressive, but character faces themselves look like potatoes more often than not. Texture quality is often absurdly low and this can really stand out when its stretched across a large wall. I do want to give Stranglehold some slack however, and that's because of its extensive destruction system which allows you to blow every single part of its environments to smithereens. This necessitates environments being fairly detailed, and watching it all fall apart is exciting. It's impressive just how extensive it is and is the closest the game comes to feeling like Hard Boiled. Due to being developed primarily for systems with less than a gigabyte of RAM, I find it somewhat excusable that Midway had to pair back visual fidelity in order to achieve this. Stranglehold certainly isn't a looker, but I'll give it some slack for it's impressive destruction system.
What I don't find excusable is its lackluster PC port. The game only offers you two adjustable graphical options, both being simple toggles for dynamic shadows and decals. The lack of proper visual options or scalability means that toning down visual settings for older computers would result in minimal performance gains, while also meaning you can't crank the visuals up much further than the console versions on more powerful computers. The lack of any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering at all means the game often looks blurry and shimmery without forcing it externally. Hell, the PC port doesn't even properly support widescreen resolutions without a mod, which should tell you all you need to know about its quality. The only good thing is that the framerate is uncapped, which is actually pretty nice, especially when most Unreal Engine 3 games were capped at 62 FPS by default. All of these issues can be fixed fairly easily with mods, but shouldn't have been problems to begin with.
The soundtrack left me wanting as well. Hard Boiled's original score was dominated by jazz and drum machines, and outside of small homages, Stranglehold's score is mostly made up of extremely generic 2000s action game music. I struggle to even describe it because it is fairly generic and unimpressive, failing to build an atmosphere or push the player forwards. The main theme is nice with its Asian flutes and vocals, but that's about all that stood out to me. A huge disappointment considering how important music was to that original film's presentation and characters.
If I'm to be completely forward, Stranglehold is not a good sequel to Hard Boiled. It doesn't understand what made that original film tick in terms of writing, atmosphere, or presentation, seemingly thinking that the film was defined solely by its action. As a standalone third-person shooter though, it's pretty enjoyable in its own right. Aside from a terrible second level, the gameplay might not be special but it is very entertaining and the game is short enough to where it doesn't quite overstay its welcome. The amount of cool moves you can do while tearing everything to shreds in the game's mostly solid levels is well worth the $10 price of admission, especially for fans of John Woo's filmography and style of direction. However, the game lacks atmosphere, its soundtrack is bland, the story is drag-and-drop generic, and it's presentation is somewhat understandably lackluster given its technological goals. It's a fun distraction for a few hours, but it isn't exactly a hidden gem either.
Stranglehold's biggest boon is the game design, which allows you to do all kinds of cool moves. Diving, flipping, and even carting around the levels is fun on a primal level and for the most part the level design accommodates for that. It typically doesn't restrict you without some sort of point (there's an entire boss fight where they force you to work around a constrained arena, which is fun) and it's surprisingly challenging. Tequila Time (which is just a fancy name for bullet time), isn't just a get out of jail free card for damage, but an actual mechanic that must be learned. Treating it like a gimmick will result in death more often than not. The special moves are also quite fun, whether it be a berserk mode, a Sniper Elite-style instakill sniper mode, or a screen-clearing bullet dance. The gameplay isn't really anything special, by this point two Max Payne games had released and none of the concepts Stranglehold introduces feel fresh or unique, but they are largely well executed and its hard to complain too much when I'm sliding towards a group of enemies on a food cart. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the game's second level has to be one of the worst pacing killers in gaming history. The first level begins as the perfect tutorial, only for the second level to turn into an extremely tedious, overly long and poorly designed hunt for drug tables that of course, culminates in an overly long, unchallenging, and dull turret section. It's everything that the 7th generation of gaming is often unfairly stereotyped as, brought together into one level. Thankfully after that the rest of the game is largely smooth sailing, but it still suffers from flaws such as difficulty spikes and bullet-sponge boss fights that are largely uninteresting. Nevertheless, it does at least generally capture what it would be like to play through a John Woo film, and it deserves some commendation for that.
While Stranglehold is often quite fun, that's not what makes it a disappointing sequel to Hard Boiled. Rather, Stranglehold on a narrative level feels entirely disconnected from it. That's not to say the game needed to be a direct sequel to the film, but rather that it should have had anything to do with it at all. While you do indeed play as Inspector Tequila and the main antagonist is the father of the film's antagonist, that's where the similarities end. Stranglehold's scenario feels like you could have thrown any character ensemble in and it would be the exact same, just with Chow Yun-fat at the lead. There's none of the fun character dynamics or memorable heroes and villains of the original film and everything feels particularly stock. Viewed on its own terms, it's not exactly exciting either, feeling like any generic action film with no memorable characters, narrative stakes, or creative scenario writing. Yung Gi is sort of a fun character, and Tequila occasionally has some funny quips, but it doesn't carry any of what made Hard Boiled not just fun, but narratively gripping.
The presentation is sort of hit or miss, carrying many appealing aspects but once again failing to capture the atmosphere of Hard Boiled. Hard Boiled was a dreamlike, jazz-infused, diffused vision of Hong Kong which Stranglehold completely fails to capture without offering up a unique atmosphere of its own. It feels disappointingly contemporary, not offering any unique elements of the late-2000s. In essence, it lacks atmosphere, but that doesn't mean it always looks totally uninspired. The casino level has some fairly nice art direction across the board but for the most part the rest of the game is mostly generic aesthetically. Grey corridors, bloom-laced beaches, none of which look bad necessarily but fail to make an impression. Graphically speaking I feel Stranglehold is simultaneously quite impressive while also looking very behind the curve. The game looks very flat, and that's because the lighting is quite poor. Areas simply lack proper shadowing and look washed out and lifeless. Facial animation is actually very expressive, but character faces themselves look like potatoes more often than not. Texture quality is often absurdly low and this can really stand out when its stretched across a large wall. I do want to give Stranglehold some slack however, and that's because of its extensive destruction system which allows you to blow every single part of its environments to smithereens. This necessitates environments being fairly detailed, and watching it all fall apart is exciting. It's impressive just how extensive it is and is the closest the game comes to feeling like Hard Boiled. Due to being developed primarily for systems with less than a gigabyte of RAM, I find it somewhat excusable that Midway had to pair back visual fidelity in order to achieve this. Stranglehold certainly isn't a looker, but I'll give it some slack for it's impressive destruction system.
What I don't find excusable is its lackluster PC port. The game only offers you two adjustable graphical options, both being simple toggles for dynamic shadows and decals. The lack of proper visual options or scalability means that toning down visual settings for older computers would result in minimal performance gains, while also meaning you can't crank the visuals up much further than the console versions on more powerful computers. The lack of any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering at all means the game often looks blurry and shimmery without forcing it externally. Hell, the PC port doesn't even properly support widescreen resolutions without a mod, which should tell you all you need to know about its quality. The only good thing is that the framerate is uncapped, which is actually pretty nice, especially when most Unreal Engine 3 games were capped at 62 FPS by default. All of these issues can be fixed fairly easily with mods, but shouldn't have been problems to begin with.
The soundtrack left me wanting as well. Hard Boiled's original score was dominated by jazz and drum machines, and outside of small homages, Stranglehold's score is mostly made up of extremely generic 2000s action game music. I struggle to even describe it because it is fairly generic and unimpressive, failing to build an atmosphere or push the player forwards. The main theme is nice with its Asian flutes and vocals, but that's about all that stood out to me. A huge disappointment considering how important music was to that original film's presentation and characters.
If I'm to be completely forward, Stranglehold is not a good sequel to Hard Boiled. It doesn't understand what made that original film tick in terms of writing, atmosphere, or presentation, seemingly thinking that the film was defined solely by its action. As a standalone third-person shooter though, it's pretty enjoyable in its own right. Aside from a terrible second level, the gameplay might not be special but it is very entertaining and the game is short enough to where it doesn't quite overstay its welcome. The amount of cool moves you can do while tearing everything to shreds in the game's mostly solid levels is well worth the $10 price of admission, especially for fans of John Woo's filmography and style of direction. However, the game lacks atmosphere, its soundtrack is bland, the story is drag-and-drop generic, and it's presentation is somewhat understandably lackluster given its technological goals. It's a fun distraction for a few hours, but it isn't exactly a hidden gem either.
FallenGrace
1 month ago