Stranglehold (PC)

Killing is 42-percent more fun in slow-motion.
2/18/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Rhetorical question: Why are all these room service carts just lying around?

With John Woo's famous name prominently displayed on the box cover coupled with the game's cool-looking slow-motion, bullet ballet-style gameplay, Stranglehold has a tremendous amount of "curb appeal," as they say in the real estate business.

Translation: It makes a terrific first impression.

The idea of doing a sequel to Woo's 'Hard Boiled' not as a film but as a videogame is an intriguing one. And Stranglehold, especially in its opening moments, looks like good fun.

The first time we dove towards a series of enemies, our handguns chugging away, all in glorious slow-motion -- or "Tequila Time," to use the game's vernacular -- and we took out not one, not two, but three bad guys, our reaction was this: Let's do that again.

The second time feels just as good.

But the 10th time? The 20th time? The 100th time?

Stranglehold proves once again that age-old adage that no matter how fun something is to do, do it enough times and it begins to feel a lot like work.

Actor Chow Yun Fat reprises his role as Inspector Tequila, the toothpick-chewing supercop who possesses the ability to dive/roll/slide/jump through waves of bad guys, leaving their corpses in his wake.

What Tiger Hill and Midway obviously set out to do with Stranglehold was to recreate, in spirit, those jaw-dropping action sequences from 'Hard Boiled.' But instead of merely watching Inspector Tequila, gamers would now be able to step into his penny loafers.

It's certainly an admirable task. Woo's films, with their wild, stylish shootouts and melodramatic plots, make for great game fodder.

Stranglehold is built around the previously mentioned concept of "Tequila Time." Once triggered, the game world slows to a crawl, giving Tequila the upper hand against multiple enemies.

The concept of slowing time dates back to 2001's Max Payne. While it's clearly in peril of achieving clich&eacure; status, Stranglehold manages to make the concept feel relatively fresh by allowing Tequila to do more than simply dive to and fro while in slow motion.

We maneuvered Tequila onto a banister, and as he began to slide/surf down, the game automatically shifted into Tequila Time, allowing us to dispatch several henchmen during our descent. We made Tequila swing from chandeliers, slide on his hip across tabletops, cruise down ziplines, and yes, bellyflop onto room service carts, all in Tequila Time.

The more stylish our maneuvers while shooting at bad guys, the more style points the game awarded us. These style points filled up our Tequila Bomb meter (the red circle in the bottom left corner of the HUD).

'Tequila Bombs' are the game's oddly named special maneuvers, and they come in four varieties: Health Boosts (it's exactly what it sounds like), Precision Aim (let us shoot enemies from a great distance), Barrage Attack (let us go bananas and become invulnerable for a brief period of time), and finally Spin Attack (we spun in a circle in slow motion while, no kidding, doves flew around us; this kills every enemy in the area).

All four moves came in handy at various points during the eight or nine hours we spent working through the single-player campaign.

The other notable gameplay moment is the Standoff. Occasionally in the middle of a level, we found ourselves suddenly surrounded by enemies. A mini-game kicked in, giving us a chance to miraculously survive these guns-pointed-at-us-from-all-angles encounters. We dodged out of the way of incoming bullets -- which send ripples through the air à la 'The Matrix' -- while returning fire.