Short but nonstop shooting action from start to finish. Max Payne meets Black.
Story of Stranglehold is not so great, but considering that this is a sequel to a movie it does a fine job, because you don't need to know anything about the movie in order to enjoy the game. You play as detective Tequila, who hunts down big criminals and of course he also has some personal issues added in the mix. Story progresses through quite long and action packed cutscenes, but it's still not that interesting. This is made for worse by the lack of subtitles. In a cutscene it's tolerable, but in an intense firefight you really don't have the time to listen an enlightening dialog between a mobster and detective Tequila. Luckily it's not the story that makes this game worth playing: it's the core shooting action and Stranglehold gives you all you can handle, and then some more.
Graphics are colorful and somewhat detailed, but the star of the show here are those destructible environments. After an intense battle your environment has usually changed quite dramatically, just like in EA's Black from a few years back. Frame rate stays solid all the time so for me this is enough to forgive those blocky and ugly character models. Sound design does an OK job and things sound the way they should sound like, but it's not the incredible sound effects or music that you will remember afterwards. One annoying thing is that the speaking of characters is usually hard to hear, because there are so much other effects going on at the same time.
Gameplay is a third person shooter with lots of tequila-time, which is just a fancy term for bullet time. You'll use tequila-time constantly just like you did in Max Payne. You'll gain more power to your tequila-meter by performing stylish kills and in time you'll get to use 4 different power moves. First there's an ability to heal yourself, secondly there's an ability to shoot in slow motion really accurately just like in Sniper Elite, thirdly the ability to get unlimited ammo and invulnerability for 30 seconds and finally to shoot everyone on screen at once with white doves flying around. The third ability gives you unlimited ammo so it's likely that you will need to use it quite a lot in boss fights. Unfortunately they are just enemies with more health, so they just need a lot more bullets to go down and nothing more.
Structure of the game is very linear and short lasting only about 6 hours to play through, but there's enough action here for a 20-hour game. When I reached those ending credits I had killed 953 enemies in total and cost a damage way over 1,000,000 dollars. This linear structure makes Stranglehold repetitive in a long run, so I recommend you to play it in small doses.
Save system uses checkpoints that are usually in a good distance from one another. You can also choose your difficulty setting every time you start the game so it's very unlikely that you'll frustrate too much when playing Stranglehold.
There are some interior environments and those are not good at all, because usually you can't see where a hail of bullets comes from until you're already dead. The second chapter was especially annoying because of this, but luckily the rest of the game was better in this respect.
Enemy AI is decent, even though they just usually run straight at you and always shoot on sight. Bad thing is that sometimes enemies respawn, if you happen to walk backwards too much.
Multiplayer is clearly an afterthought, because it strips away those things that made the campaign fun. Bullet-time works only if all players use it at the same time (and usually this doesn't happen very often). This means that Stranglehold is not very good for online shooter fans.
After the single player campaign there's not much to do so consider Stranglehold as a nice snack picked up from a bargain bin.