Stranglehold (2007)

I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure.

Game number 19 was “John Woo Presents: Stranglehold.” This is an over-the-top third person shooter that serves as the sequel to John Woo’s movie Hard Boiled. This kinda amazes me. Who has heard of a movie having its sequel story be in the form of a video game before? IDK, but I thought the transition went pretty well.

You need to be the kind of person who really likes extreme action and just doesn’t question it when a story goes above and beyond what seems rational to enjoy this game. Good thing, because I am that person. I loved the stupid story about Tequila being the rogue cop who breaks the rules to make sure that he gets the job done. I also loved the gimmicky story of betrayals, murders, and lots and lots of bullets. Maybe its because I love these movies and nothing like Stranglehold has been made in 10-15 years, but I felt like I needed this hopped up action rollercoaster in my life.

At its core, the gameplay is just like any other 3rd person shooter. You run around and shoot people that are shooting at you. The main change is that you are an actual badass here in comparison to every other game. Pressing the right trigger will fling your character in whatever direction you are moving in and will slow time down. What did they decide to call this slow-motion time? TEQUILA TIME! I chuckle a little bit every time I think of the phrase “tequila time.” It makes me think of the start to every stupid decision I made in college.

Okay, so I didn’t find this game that challenging on the normal difficulty. It's possible that’s because every second game in the Road To 360 challenge has been a 3rd person shooter and I’m getting pretty good at the genre… but I think the actual reason is that I dove around and used tequila time with reckless abandon. Here’s a tip for anyone considering playing this game. If you killed an enemy and you didn’t do it in tequila time then you have done something disastrously wrong. My gameplay consisted of me dolphin diving to the left, shooting enemies in slow motion, then immediately dolphin diving back to the right… and repeat until the room is finished. I died maybe 3-4 times (outside of the standoffs which I will get to in a minute) the whole game. Also, DO NOT USE THE SHOTGUN IT'S TERRIBLE!

Every enemy you kill will give you stars… which I think unlock things on the main menu screen, but I never checked that out. The other purpose of these stars is that they will fill your special meter. When you fill the meter you can execute 4 different moves, a heal, a snipe, an invincibility mode, and a spin. The main things that you will use here are the heal and the invincibility mode. This is one of the reasons why I told you to constantly flop around all over the place when fighting enemies. You get a base of 3 stars for killing enemies while flopping and 1 star when not doing that. This means that you will fill your gauge 3 times faster when flopping around than not… meaning you can heal yourself 3 times as often. I was often able to out heal any incoming damage.

Outside of that, there are only two gameplay features. The first is pretty simple: there are explodable/destroyable terrain elements that you can hit to kill enemies. Finally, there are the standoffs. These are miserable and I died once to almost all of them. Standoffs are a mini game where Tequila will be standing in between a bunch of enemies and you have to align a cursor up with them and shoot, while dodging the enemy bullets. This would be fine, but some of the camera angles make it all but impossible to see which direction the bullets are coming from. I died more than once because I thought the bullet was coming towards the right, but it was actually going to the center or the left.

Another complaint that I have with the game are enemy spawns. Enemies spawn in seemingly random locations, often directly next to you. This leads to an uncertainty where it is safe to stand vs not and can often lead to you being surrounded by enemies.

While the enemy spawns and the standoffs are not great, the worst part of this game are the ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE boss fights. Each of these bosses can tank upwards of 1000 bullets. I am not joking. I think the final boss of the game required me to use over 1000 bullets to kill. Why? Did they not think that there was a better way to handle these fights? Its not even like there was a need for the bosses to take 7-8 minutes to kill. Most of them just shoot at you and maybe have a single mechanic. After about the first half of the game I audibly groaned every time a boss came on screen. Honestly, I would take every single one out of the game if I had my way.

Overall, Stranglehold is a really fun and funny time if you are into these types of over-the-top action games/movies. I found myself smiling and laughing during most of my playthrough of the game. Furthermore, the campaign is short. I beat it in about 4 hours, so it’s not a huge investment. The standoffs suck, the enemy spawns are frustrating, and the bosses are terrible… but I am still glad I played the game. If you liked Max Payne go ahead and give this a try. (7/10)

I spent 4 hours, 3 min, and 57 sec on John Woo Presents: Stranglehold.

I have spent 217 hrs and 12 min on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next Game: Brutal Legend (I got to choose since its game number 20)

You can tell that John Woo had creative input on the direction this game took. The plot is hilariously stupid and contrived just like Hard Boiled (don't get me wrong, I love that movie). There are too many somber moments for my liking and they stick out as the weakest moments of the game. By the end I was left befuddled over why Mr. Wong wanted Tequila's daughter, but fuck it. Let's kill some baddies. The best scene is hands down when there's a Jazz band in the middle of a shootout. The band is about to leave, for good reason, but then a goon threatens them to keep playing. You then engage in an outrageously violent shootout while the band nervously plays in the middle.

The game is brimming with John Woo's signature style. The graphics are dated by modern standards, but it's still impressive the details they were able to incorporate. The destructible environments captures the essence of any good John Woo action scene. Concrete will break apart, priceless art will be riddled with bullet holes and it's fun to shoot down a sign to kill a few goons below. It's nothing ground breaking, but it succeeds to add a dimension of physicality to the environments and gun play.

Like with Max Payne, bullet time is the name of the game. I do think the gun play feels better in Stranglehold, but Max Payne is still the better game. The issue is with level design. Stranglehold is a series of combat arenas slapped together with a few cut scenes thrown in for good measure. Little to no thought was given to balance or enemy placement. It feels like the devs just said "fuck it," and hit a button to spawn more enemies. You will be constantly bombarded by enemies that will keep spawning like bunnies out of their warrens (in this case random doors placed throughout the arena).

I found the first 2-3 levels to be a blast. I mindlessly jumped around in slow-mo, belly flopped onto a cart to then roll down a hall blasting baddies left and right, or grinded down a railing doing the same thing. It felt awesome. After those first few levels, the difficulty spikes radically. You need to start playing slower and I began to see the seams in the design. For some arenas, it's best to just stay put because some of the enemy warren spawners only trigger after you pass a certain threshold. If you move too quickly, you will get overwhelmed and gunned down quickly. This caused the pacing of the game to suffer as I was forced to spawn camp in a safe corner. You don't have many defensive tools, so you're basically forced to play like this to survive.

Another issue is with the godawful boss fights. They never felt fun and only were infuriating since they were veritable bullet sponges. Every regular enemy can die in one hit, but these fuckers would require 10 rockets to the face to die. They should have come up with a more creative solution to boss encounters. Not sure what, but anything but a bullet sponge. It just felt so incongruent to the whole experience. Why is this elderly man wearing glasses more durable than a goddamn tank?

You are given special moves. First is to heal for a small amount of life. Next is to zoom in and shoot someone with a precise shot (pretty lackluster), the third is to enter a barrage mode where you have infinite ammo and are invulnerable (easily the best move) and finally Tequila enters a dance like state and kills everyone in the room while doves fly around him. While the finally move is hilariously awesome looking, I found it to be terrible. It seems like no more than 4-5 goons can be spawned in at a time and I found it hard to tell how many bad guys are currently active. Whenever I used it, I would only kill1-2 guys, then a new wave of bad guys would immediately replace them. It was garbage.

Finally, the game shoehorns clunky platforming which never felt right. This was mostly due to the jump mechanics. Whenever you press space bar, Tequila does a dive. This makes sense during gun play, so you look stylish as you fall in slow mo and gun down some goons, but makes the forced platforming feel as comfortable as using the original Xbox controller with crab claws. There are some objects that allow you to awkwardly run along when you press space bar near them, but these animations just look silly. You will run along a statue, like a toy train on a track.

In conclusion, this game is profoundly stupid and poorly designed but I still managed to have fun. It's short which makes it's grating design flaws tolerable.

Back when Playstations came loaded with demos, I played the first level of this game plenty of times. It was a fun little diversion when I was bored and didn’t feel like replaying Red Dead Redemption for the 8th time. I caught Stranglehold on sale on GOG for about $2 and I decided to see what the rest of the game was like.

The graphics very much reek of the early 2010s. The characters don’t look terrible, but they have that dated, rubbery skin texture. There’s also plenty of bloom and the world has that desaturated, gritty filter that ever game had back then. The animations are decent on your player character as he leaps around and dives over tables. Some of the enemies have a bad habit of glitching out and running around in little circles. Most of the objects in the world are also destructible, because it was the early 2010s, and that is a neat feature. It’s fun watching the hail of bullets cutting down a stone wall creating a new doorway.

How this game plays is also very 2010-ish. It’s a budget Max Payne knock-off. Anytime Tequila, your player character, does anything acrobatic; like running up a stair railing, riding a bar cart, or just taking a dive, the world slows down ala Bullet Time. Even here, it’s still a fun mechanic and necessary for some of the tougher levels, which is most of them. You don’t have a dedicated jump button, instead you have to find interactable acrobatic spots to climb up the arenas. There’s a small selection of your standard guns to pick from; pistols, SMG, shotgun, and assault rifles. Every once in a while, you get a special golden pistol or an LMG to play with.

The level designs aren’t anything to special. Don’t get me wrong, you get to have shootouts in some neat locations like a Chicago museum’s dinosaur exhibit or a jazz club where the band keeps playing during the firefight. While the set dressing is pretty, the layout is where it falls flat. You get plenty of places to move around and use your Tequila Time, but they’re all large, square rooms or city blocks with bad guys just flooding in from various spawn points. Once you kill the required amount of bad dudes a door opens and you walk down a hallway to another arena. The developers do try to mix it up a little bit. There’s one level where you first place down some health/ammo spawners, adding a little tactics to it and there’s an on-rails helicopter section.

There doesn’t feel like there’s much rhyme or reason to combat in this game. You can take cover behind select walls and the game makes it seem like the best strategy is to keep moving as Tequila’s fighitng style is very Gun Fu, but by the end they are throwing huge waves of enemies at you with bullets raining from every direction that it seems almost unfair. By level 2 I was already having a tough time, so I resorted to using cheats for infinite ammo and health. This game is difficult, and it doesn’t feel like a Dark Souls type of difficulty, more of a bullshit difficulty.

Stranglehold is actually meant to be a sequel to a 90s loose cannon cop film, Hard Boiled. I have not seen the original, but I kinda want to see it now, supposedly it’s one of John Woo’s classics. A video game sequel to a movie is a uniquely interesting premise. You can tell this game is based on a 90s cop film and I kind of adore it for that. It has all the classic tropes; loose cannon cop with a drinking problem, permanently angry police chief, a crooked undercover cop, and plenty of gangsters. Tequila is trying to save his family that were captured by the Russian mob, your “wife” is the daughter of a Triad boss, and the Russians want to use her as leverage to get into the action in Hong Kong. Tequila spends the next 7-8 levels murdering every gangster in sight. It’s a relatively short game, which is a mark in its favor. Most levels end with a boss battle, which is just shooting at the bullet sponge enemy. They did get ambitious with one boss; you had to navigate a laser mine field while you shot at him.

All in all, this game is good for mindless fun and a cheesy story. The difficulty is a little crap but get some cheats and just mow down through everyone. It’s regular price on GOG isn’t too steep so if you’re a fan of John Woo or Max Payne I’d recommend this.