Has lots of John Woo style, but not a lot of substance to go with it
Graphics & sound (7.5) :
Developers, Tiger Hill, have done a good job of bringing director John Woo's vision to reality. The locations look very much like film sets and the level of destructibility is spectacular. If something looks breakable, chances are that it is. The character models are also very detailed, Chow Yun-Fat looks especially life-like. On the other hand, running in 1080p there are some quite obvious visual problems, the most clear being a strange cross-hatching on shadows.
The sound in the game tends to let down the visuals. The voice-acting is truly dreadful and some of the weapon sounds are very tame. It doesn't ruin the experience by any means but it certainly takes away some of it's edge.
Gameplay (6.5) :
If you've played Max Payne then there is very little new to see in Stranglehold. You shoot people in the face, occasionally dive sideways or backwards in slow-motion and continue to shoot people as some nice bullet-time effects kick in.
The way in which this game differentiates itself from the "Payne" series is through some neat little context sensitive actions. These include running up and down handrails & bannisters and diving onto moving carts which you can then lie-down on as they move and continue to shoot as you go. Its interesting and it does give you an adrenaline rush the first few times you see these actions, but this quickly wears off and you'll go back to just diving around.
This is broken up by the occasional "stand-off" where you are circled by enemies and have to dodge bullets using the left stick while taking the bad guys down one at a time. These are good fun, but get very tough on the harder difficulties.
In terms of length, the single-player game is very short, somewhere around 6 hours. It's also much more difficult than you might expect. Even playing on "medium" the game quickly becomes taxing and the distance between checkpoints makes dying incredibly frustrating. The boss-fights are also annoying and aren't very imaginative. They're all essentially just big guys with big guns.
Online multiplayer :
Unfortunately no one is playing this game online any more which makes it pretty hard to talk about how it plays over Xbox Live, so I won't be rating this section. It also means that a big chunk of the game's achievements are more or less impossible to unlock and takes away some of the game's value for money.
Overall (6.5) :
John Woo Presents Stranglehold is fun to play while it lasts and has some really good moments. Unfortunately though, it's just too similar to the Max Payne games and it doesn't manage to keep the player coming back again and again, like those games did. That said, hardcore Max Payne fans may find something to entertain them, given that Max Payne 3 never happened.
If you can find Stranglehold cheap in the sales or pre-owned then it's worth a look, but with so much competition in shooters these days, it just isn't going to take pride-of-place over other titles in the genre.