John Woo Presents Stranglehold for Xbox 360

Various games try to capture Max Payne and Matrix-style gameplay to varied results. One of the good things about modern gaming's need to churn out games for a quick dollar is that today there are really good used titles you can find for a budget price that often have very little artistic merit or lasting appeal but are still very fun to play.

Stranglehold is one of those titles. I got it for five or six bucks and it's well worth that, but little else. The three-hour single player experience is worth playing through once and then discarding. Strangely enough, I played through this twice. A few years back I rented it with my infinite rental pass and more recently I thought I hadn't finished it so I picked it up and realized I did finish it though I remember not finishing it, since the last boss was so distinct in my brain. Strange. But maybe that's because the second half of the game is generally very forgettable.

You're some Asian guy with a fat face. Chow Yun Fat? I'm guessing yes because it looks exactly like him. I looked it up and yes. This guy has appeared in over 80 films and in my opinion has the personality of bread, but that's just me. He's been in John Woo films. This game is based on John Woo's films, hence the use of doves during your ultimate special  move. The main character is also a man called Tequila. There's something wrong with that but I digress.

So you go along these stages, doing Max Payne-style jumps into enemies and slo-mo cuts along with context-sensitive commands like running up rails, hanging on lights and blowing out rafters so rocks can fall on enemies. This all works well. There are very few guns in the game but that's fine. You almost never run out of things to do but I found that the easiest method for progressing was to quickly slo mo, kill an enemy and un-slow mo without any of the theatrics that the game lets you attempt. Cheap, but simple. I got bad grades on about half of the levels because of this, but oh well. You also get special moves. The first, most important restores your health, the second snipes an enemy in the head, and the third and fourth barrage bullets and clear the room of enemies. I never used the third and fourth moves because clearing the room of enemies felt like a cop out and I didn't need the bullet barrage because all except the last boss die from one or two headshots, and every shot I made in this game was a headshot. At least the precision controls are good.

So are the stages, though the fifth and six just kind of blur by. The first is pure action, the second is more objective based and the third is kind of a survival-fest in a hotel. The fourth is literally just a shootout in an apartment with a chopper. The seven stages are short. The second stage is the longest by far, with the first, fifth, six and seventh taking about ten minutes if you blur through them. After you finish, you can get a better ranking, but the game offers no incentive. So since it's finished and done with, I am done with the game, likely never to return to it unless I need a quick shooter fix. The graphics are decent though not great (Most PS3 ports look like garbage to be honest) the audio is fine, but I can't really commend a game for being so brief and not that remarkable at the same time. It's a shame because there are a lot of great ideas at work. It feels like an older PC game because of the environmental puzzles and the crosshair being less sticky meaning more control and skill required to make precision shots. But in the end it's just not that amazing to me on a whole.