Aramation Games

John Woo presents Stranglehold, sequel to the movie Hard Boiled in a game format. Starring Chow Yun Fat as inspector Tequila, the game chronicles his adventures trying to save his kidnapped wife and daughter. To do so, he must kill many and destroy everything he can using different guns, which is a typical John Woo movie. At least the game gets the feeling right: it is a John Woo movie in a game form. Tequila automatically slide over obstacles, time slows down to a crawl as you leap, you can go up/down ledges, hang from chandelier to kill enemies and even lie on top of a rolling cart to bring destruction and mayhem.

What the game needed was more time for polish. The visuals are just ok, and some of the textures are downright ugly (especially buildings), water effects are incredibly mediocre and enemy AI is, simply put, stupid. Oftentimes, they’ll get stuck and it’ll be up to you to go to them and put them out of their misery. As an incredibly resilient police detective, you can get stuck in scenery as well and navigating tight areas will show you bad camera angles unlike in the movies. Time slowing down, and incredible amount of destruction, were already done in Max Payne games, and this seems to be a cheap homage.

The single player’s incredibly short length doesn’t help much: at least it prevents you from getting tired of time slowing down every time you jump, or you spot an enemy. After you spend a few hours blasting enemies and environment, you’ll quickly realize that the concept is great, but the execution incredibly shallow.

Rating: 50%

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