John Woo's Stranglehold casts you as Inspector Tequila, one of Woo's most well-known film characters. And the whole idea behind the game is to put you in the shoes of one of Woo's gunplay-happy movie roles and let you go at it with all of the tools that give Woo's films their unique look and feel.

The gameplay has one single motivation: to take all of John Woo's stylish, signature gunfight techniques and place them at your disposal. The game makers wisely put these techniques to good use -- you can play through much of the game by simple shooting, but at times the game forces you to use the "cool" techniques in order to complete a level. Likewise, the more stylishly you take down your enemies, the more points you score, and those points come in very handy.

Most of these stylish moves are programmed into Tequila's basic movements. Run into a table or a counter-top, and Tequila will slide across it. Pull the left trigger and you'll take a slow-mo dive in whatever direction you're moving. Slide down banisters and hand rails, run across fallen support beams, or dive onto a rolling hand cart and ride it through a crowded arena full of enemies, all while shooting to your heart's content.

A move I relied on often was hiding behind a corner or an overturned table, and then ducking into sight briefly to take aim at my enemies. All of these moves are conducted independent of aiming your weapons, and once you get an enemy in your sights while performing one of these maneuvers, "Tequila Time" is activated. Tequila Time is what cinema and gaming fans know better as Bullet Time -- put simply, time slows down but your ability to aim and fire does not. You can also activate Tequila Time at will, but it's a finite commodity.

Other special moves are unlocked as you progress through the game, and build up those aforementioned "stylish kill" points. "Precision Aim" zooms in on an enemy from far away, allows you to select what part of their body you want to shoot, and then follows the bullet's shot with a flying camera move. "Barrage Attack" is a special kind of Tequila Time where you unleash a storm of bullets on your enemies, and the bullets do more damage than usual. The "Spin Attack" is your most lethal weapon, launching Tequila into a ferocious volley of firepower that takes down every enemy in the vicinity. Both of these last two moves also render Tequila invulnerable to damage.

Whenever a crucial fight is going down, or is about to go down, a "Mexican Standoff" is triggered automatically. This game mode is one of the more fun challenges, with an almost puzzle-like aspect to it. With the left thumbstick, you move Tequila from side-to-side to dodge incoming fire; with the right thumbstick, you target your enemies and pull the right trigger to shoot them. It's trickier than it sounds, getting faster each time you do it, but it's crazy fun.

Nearly every part of every environment is fully destructible, which adds significantly to the fun factor. The graphics are high-grade, but not the best ever seen. No, the real emphasis here is on those unique gameplay mechanics, and even the environment and graphics are mere tools in accomplishing the "coolness" of playing the game. For example, you'll often find plenty of boxes, windows, or groceries blocking the path between you and your enemies -- all of which are there for you to blow to smithereens and create lovely slow motion chaos while you take down the bad guys.

Some of the game's mechanics seem to give Tequila an almost unfair advantage at times, but the game is structured smartly enough that you'll often find yourself fighting without any "stylish" help just long enough to build up your points meter in order to unleash those more deadly moves at just the right moment. The game handicaps most of the game so well in this way, that even newcomers should find it easy and fun to pick up and play. But this is where the game is at its smartest, because let's face it -- it just feels cool to slide down a hand rail while taking down bad guys in slow motion. And who wants to spend an hour learning how to do that when you could just pick up the controller and go to town?

The story, which one would expect to take on greater importance in a game with the name of a legendary director like John Woo's on it, almost seems like an afterthought at times. It's there to give you an excuse to go around blowing everything and everyone to kingdom come, but it doesn't serve any other purpose. It tries (very hard, at times) to provide cinema-style storytelling and emotional motivations for Tequila's actions, even weaving in flashbacks to some twenty years ago (where Tequila inexplicably looks exactly the same as he does now), but ultimately the drama is so stilted and predictable, it just can't help but fall flat.

The full cast of characters -- most of whom are villains for Tequila to mow down -- benefit from fine voice acting, most notably Tequila himself, voiced by Chow Yun-Fat, reprising his role from John Woo's classic film Hard Boiled. If only they'd been given better words to say; most of the scripted dialogue is so ridiculously, over-the-top clichéd, you'll frequently find yourself laughing where you should be empathizing with a character's plight. Tequila's chief of detectives is the character most guilty of this, constantly harping at Tequila's play-by-his-own-rules approach with lines right out of every bad cop movie ever filmed.

I wouldn't have minded a feature that would allow you to turn off the blood that splashes the air whenever you kill an enemy -- particularly with a stylish kill. I'm no prude, but the spewing blood is gratuitously cartoonish and an option to turn it off -- which would've required a simple code tweak -- could have allowed the game to appeal to a wider audience. (You'd think modern gamemakers would be interested in such things.)

One other odd downside I experienced was an unrelenting motion sickness. I'm used to first-person shooters, but Stranglehold is the first game since the old PC game Descent (anybody else remember that one?) that gave me an extreme bout of motion sickness. It probably stemmed from the fact that other characters frequently start shooting at you, and it's never all that easy to determine where they're shooting from. So I found myself spinning the camera about madly, trying to find the source of the latest gunfire.

Stranglehold is a fairly short ride, with only seven chapters to the story, each of which you can grind through in less than an hour (though I think the game is meant to appeal to more casual gamers, who would hopefully take their time). I imagine that the game makers kept the play time to a minimum because they realized how repetitive the gameplay becomes after the first few chapters. The game does a good job of mixing up the locations and therefore the challenges (a fishing village-slash-harbor offers some particularly welcome variety), but you could very easily jump/dive/slow-mo your way through the whole game if you want. The gameplay is addictive and fun, and replay value is added in unlockable features.

It's a one-trick pony, no doubt about it. But if you're looking to unwind and blow off steam with some stylish, shoot-'em-up fun, then it's a wicked cool trick to take part in.

• Visit the Screenshots Gallery for official images from Stranglehold.

Comments (0)