Stranglehold, which is John Woo’s Videogame sequel to Hard Boiled, sees you take on the role of Inspector Tequila who has a no nonsense approach to taking down criminals and with various ways of taking enemies down you just know you are going to have a lot of fun.

The game begins with you going to a small town in Hong Kong, where a deal is going down. This is where the fun begins and thankfully the game is very simple to learn. Right Trigger is for firing, the A button is for changing weapons, the B button for throwing Grenades, the Left Trigger for diving and finally RB for  Tequila Time. Tequila time to explain this a little further, is very much like Max Payne’s slow motion which basically allows you to aim in normal time while giving you more chance of dodging bullets. Pressing the buttons on the D-pad allows you to use what is called Tequila Bombs, these are special moves which you earn by killing enemies, the more style you use to kill the enemies, the more Tequila Bombs you earn for the Tequila bar, you can also gain these by collecting Origami which are spread out in all the levels.

There are also special moves available to you which are accessed by the d-pad, press left for healing, up for precision shooting, right on the d-pad barricade, which is infinite ammo and health for a limited time, And down on the d-pad for a nifty spinning attack, this attack kills every enemy in the area. You unlock these different moves later in the game.

In certain parts of the game you will have to have a standoff with a certain amount of enemies, these are relatively simple to do. Standoffs go into Tequila Time allowing you to dodge oncoming bullets, some enemies will have hazardous objects near them which can be used to take them out, by using these hazards you get more style points than if you just shoot them. What we did notice is that your bullets seem to have a power boost and it will only take one shot to kill the enemy, but the enemies’ bullets are also more powerful. Later in the game you will find yourself having to dodge the bullets faster otherwise you will be dead quite quickly.

There are many ways to dispatch enemies in this game, in the first few levels you can see white glows to some objects, by shooting these you can kill the enemy quite effectively. Most of the scenery in the game can be destroyed or interacted with in some way and it’s a lot of fun destroying things to. You can also swing from objects, jump on trolleys and slide down railings dispatching enemies while you do it.

Unfortunately Stranglehold does have some bad points, for instance, the story itself is very weak, meaning you would have had to seen Hard Boiled to know how all this started. Basically eighteen years ago Tequila’s Girlfriend was captured by her Father who is James Wang; basically he blackmails you to get her back and her Daughter who have been captured by Yung Gi. I won’t say anymore about the story because I don’t want to give away the rest of it.

The Graphics while not groundbreaking really aren’t that bad, the environment effects are quite nice but the enemies and some of the textures are quite bland and boring. I would expect much more from a game utilising the Unreal Engine 3 from what I have seen from other games using this engine, however as most of your time is spent looking for where the next enemy will be and what against them there is no real issue here. 

Overall the game is quite short with only 7 small levels however there are quite a variety of difficulty settings, at the start of the game you have only access to Easy and Normal but once you complete the game the hard and hardboiled are options are unlocked. Luckily if you completed normal mode first then you unlock the achievements for both normal and easy. At times the game can be extremely hard and frustrating even on Normal difficulty so prepare yourself for this.

Thankfully there is quite a bit of replay value as you can retry levels to get a higher grade and style points, style points are used in the unlock shop where you can unlock concept art, early videos of the game, and characters for multiplayer. There is even an Achievement for unlocking John Woo and getting 100 kills with him in Multiplayer.

The multiplayer allows you to use all the moves you got in Single player, but at times can be very laggy but once you find a good game it can be a very fun and adrenaline filled experience. But it does seem to feel like it has been tacked on.

Stranglehold is a very enjoyable action game and one that we would recommend for fans of the genre,  while it is quite short, it is fun and fast paced and has plenty of replay value. If you are not convinced it’s for you then perhaps try renting it first, you certainly won’t regret it though if you do decide to add it to your collection.