Stranglehold isn't a Hard Boiled game.
Well, John Woo answered the call. Stranglehold, the spiritual sequel to Woo's 1992 motion picture Hard Boiled, a gritty action-packed cop movie starring Chow Yun Fat as Inspector "Tequila" Yuen, is what transpired. Hard Boiled is regarded as some of Woo's best work and is often mentioned when people talk about action movies. The game picks up a couple of years after the movie left off, as we find Tequila investigating the mysterious disappearance of a police officer. The investigation runs deeper than that, as he'll find himself in the middle of a gang war between the Russian Mafia and the Triad, with his daughter and estranged girlfriend as bait.
We've already established that John Woo is synonymous with action. This game is chock full of it from beginning to end. For example, Tequila has the ability to go into Tequila Time, a new term for Bullet Time, where time slows down, allowing him to gain an advantage over his enemies. While in this mode, he can perform several outlandish moves such as riding food carts while flat on his stomach, running up or down stair ramps and swinging from chandeliers. When Tequila is able to pull off these moves, amongst others, he gets performance points which fill up his Tequila Bomb meter.
You get 4 different types of bombs Tequila can use. Amongst them are Health, Aim, Barrage & Spin. Health is pretty self-explanatory. Aim allows you to shoot enemies from a good distance as the camera follows the bullet to its ultimate destination. Barrage allows Tequila to plow through his enemies without taking any damage for a short period of time. Spin resembles Barrage, except that Tequila will stand still and spin around, shooting every visible enemy. The last 2 Bombs are quite effective. I'd even go as far to say that they are too effective, as they take away some of the challenge the game offers.
If shooting people in the face isn't enough for you, know that Stranglehold's environments are pretty much all destructible by gun fire. This adds a lot to the sheer violence and destruction in the game. It's quite cool to go around and shoot everything you see to smithereens. You can even use the environment to your advantage, as certain elements can be shot and dropped upon unsuspecting enemies. This is a very fun aspect of the game which, sadly, isn't exploited to its fullest. I also found it hard to spot where the environment can be shot, especially later on in the game.
The graphics in the game are, without a shadow of a doubt, it's best attribute. The character models, especially Chow Yun Fat & John Woo, look extremely lifelike. The levels look great and are very detailed, even though their configuration tends to become repetitious. Most of the levels are pretty straightforward and linear, making it impossible to get lost. The cutscenes are very cinematic, but I guess since John Woo is a movie director, there's no surprise here..
The sound effects aren't anything out of the ordinary. The guns sound like they pack a good punch. The voice work done by the actors is decent, although I did have some difficulty understanding Chow at times. The dialogue is downright ridiculous and the delivery is even more ridiculous, but I guess that's to be expected in this game where action takes center stage. Nonetheless, the story is overly predictable and you'll find yourself laughing more often than not at the corniness of it all.
Although the gameplay is pretty solid all-around, the game itself doesn't help to push the third-person shooter genre forward in any way. Instead, it relies on mechanics that are already in place and, most of all, have been used and over-used throughout the years. Tequila Time is damn fun... for the first 2 hours of gameplay. It just seems like Tequila is ALWAYS in this state and that the simple run & gun has been pushed aside a bit too much. It seems like every object Tequila comes in contact with makes him go into Tequila Time. This can become quite annoying, especially when you're trying to move around.
The biggest problem with this game has to be the re-playability, or lack thereof. Stranglehold clocks in at 6-7 hours, maximum. That's very short, even by today's standards. Once you finish the game, there's no real reason to go back to it, except maybe to get a couple more achievements. There are 4 difficulty levels ranging from Casual to Hard Boiled, but the game isn't all that difficult to begin with, so playing it on Hard shouldn't be much of a challenge (Hard Boiled is locked until you complete the game once).
There is an online mode in Stranglehold, but it is so broken that it would've been better off not being there at all. Upon release, it was almost impossible to join a match as the connection would simply drop upon loading the map. Things weren't that much better once this was fixed. The online is a total snooze-fest and really feels like it was tacked on at the last minute.
For so many reasons, it's hard for me to fully appreciate what Stranglehold brings to the table. The game was clearly built to be an homage to Max Payne, which in turn was an hommage to Hard Boiled, but it fails in it's task. The over-use of Bullet Time, the short single player campaign and the total lack of a good online multi player are 3 strikes too many. This game could've been so much more, especially coming from John Woo and Midway. I really wanted to enjoy this game, I wanted to write this review and state that it was revolutionary and amazingly fun but, sadly, that's not the case. I'm not saying the game is a total flop, it's quite enjoyable for a while. Regrettably, that while doesn't last long enough.