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| | Difficulty: 4 | | Learning Curve: 4 | Published by:  mattster | | Date: 2009-05-17 |
| | Gameplay |    | 5
| | Graphics | | 9
| | Sound | | 9
| | Value | | 2
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Stranglehold, a blockbuster title with John Woo assisting in development and a crack cast of actors including Chow Yun Fat as Inspector Tequila Yuen. This is a sequel to John Woo's Movie Hard Boiled, it is hard and in some parts will make your blood boil.
Story
 I won’t spoil much here but that’s not saying much as the story isn’t all that deep to start with but what could you expect? The game comes off as a shoot em up movie title ported into a game and it honestly does this very well. You play the role of an ace cop who basically takes the law into his own hands and in the process shoots up damn near all of Hong Kong and a few buildings in Chicago. The goons in the game are split between the Russian Mafia and the Chinese Triads. Just like any decent shoot em up movie you don’t start playing this game hoping to be sucked into a deep and twisted plot, if this were a movie I’d compare it to Smokin Aces or Crank. A lot of people are going to die in awkward and violent ways and you know it.
Graphics
Graphically speaking Stranglehold looked absolutely stunning. Epic Games’ Unreal 3.0 engine is used to great effect along with the Massive D modification which lets the player destroy just about everything within the world. The textures used in the game range from your obscure tiles for floors, marble walls, doors, and other mundane objects but what really stands out are the character textures. Faces are rendered incredibly life-like, skin looks like skin, and expressions are accurately recreated on the faces. I must say the rendering of the characters, from bosses to goons, really impressed me and while most of this is due to the Unreal 3.0 engine, some credit must be given to Midway and Tiger Hill Entertainment.
Audio
Stranglehold really excels in this feature. When you shoot a shotgun at a tile wall you hear the report from the shotgun, the crash of the shot hitting the tiles, then the sound of the tiles hitting the floor. Feel like shooting that watermelon in the market? Well it’ll make a nice squishing noise as it blows into little chunks and then you can even hear the chunks hit the ground. When you are in a gun fight with a dozen other goons you can hear them yelling, hear them reloading, and vividly hear their bullets slamming into everything around you. This attention to sound really is what puts the gameplay over the top.
Gameplay
It is very sad when a game completely fails in it’s execution due to a frustrating design rather than a choppy engine. Within Stranglehold there are a few features that really make the game fun and then a few issues that make it so frustrating that you find yourself yelling at your screen and scaring your neighbors. But it isn't all bad.
Tequila time! Happy Hour!? You could almost call it that, Tequila time is a feature in which you slow down the game and it lets you pull off some truly remarkable shots. Tequila time consumes a bar under your health which slowly recharges but in the roughly 10 seconds of slow-motion you can cause a epic amount of damage.
Interacting with the environment is another huge feature within the game. Run up to a table and hit space-bar and Tequila will kick the table over and duck behind it. Run towards a pillar and Tequila will stand behind it and let you shoot around it all while the goons blast your pillar to pieces. Hit LT near a railing on a staircase and Tequila will surf down the railing while slowing down time telling you shoot the goons on the staircase to bits. Just running forward and hitting LT will cause Tequila to dive in the air, perfect for diving at enemies with guns blazing. How about that chandelier? Just run at it, hit LT, and Tequila will jump and grab it, swinging around while you get to shoot goons from a makeshift trapeze.
Verdict
Sadly my feelings on this game aren’t exactly black and white, just a ton of grey. The engine itself and the process of blowing up an entire level is just so damn awesome that it’s hard to think this is a flawed game until I remember the shoot-outs. The story itself is about average for a First/Third Person shooter so that’s not really decisive. The game itself only contains maybe 8 hours of gameplay, perhaps 10 if you tried to form some sort of strategy rather than running in guns blazing(much more fun). At the end of the day though I know I won’t pick this game up again as the only thing that kept me plowing through the hundreds of goons and completely frustrating shootouts was the desire to beat the game and taking it out of my tray.
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| | There are 55 achievements with a total of 1250 points available |  | Death from Above
In multiplayer, kill an opponent with a falling object in Kowloon Market. | 20 |  |  | Fisticuffs
In multiplayer, kill an opponent with a melee attack. | 10 | |  | Diplomatic Immunity
In multiplayer, kill an opponent in the hull of the ship in Naval Exercise | 20 | |  | Castaway
In multiplayer, kill an opponent on the Heavy Machine Gun platform in Tai O Settlement | 20 | |  | Asplosion
In multiplayer, kill an opponent with an explosive in Slums Downpour. | 20 | | | View All Achievements (55) |
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