- Title: Stranglehold
- Platform:Xbox 360
- Publisher: Midway
- Developer: Midway
- ESRB Rating: “M” for Mature
- Genre: Third-Person-Shooter
- Pros: Looks and feels like a Hong Kong action flick; lots of shooting and explosions
- Cons: Gets repetitive pretty quickly; single-player is very short; multiplayer isn’t so hot
Story
Stranglehold is John Woo’s videogame sequel to his classic action movie, Hard Boiled. Chow Yun Fat reprises his role as Inspector Tequila, and his in-game model is surprisingly lifelike and accurate. There is a story buried in here somewhere about rival gangs and doublecrosses and that sort of thing, which Hard Boiled and Hong Kong action fans will surely find enjoyable, but for most of us the focus in Stranglehold is squarely on pure action rather than story.
Features
The single-player mode in Stranglehold will only take you about 5-7 hours and is fairly easy unless you play it on hard or the unlockable Hard Boiled difficulty. The length is pretty short, and it doesn’t help that the game becomes pretty repetitive fairly quickly which is going to greatly affect your desire for repeat plays through the game. It holds up well enough to play through once, but you’ll get tired of it. Once you are done with single-player, there is also a multiplayer mode, but it is small and limited and feels tacked on. Six players can play deathmatch or team deathmatch, but all of the slow-mo and flipping around doesn’t translate too well into multiplayer. The disappointing multi and short single-player make Stranglehold a solid rental but nothing more.
Gameplay
All of these abilities combined with how you can use the environment and using special things like rolling carts, running on railings, or swinging from chandeliers make for an extremely entertaining experience. At least it does for the first level or two. At that point you have seen pretty much everything that Stranglehold has to offer. Still fun, but awfully repetitive.
Graphics and Sound
The presentation in Stranglehold is extremely polished and impressive in terms of both graphics and sound. The character models, for main characters at least, look nice and detailed and Chow Yun Fat in particular is great looking. The environments are the real star here, though, and they are extremely detailed and completely destructible. Imagine the lobby scene from The Matrix – that is how Stranglehold is for the entire 5-7 hour campaign.Bottom Line
