Review: Stranglehold

When you go to see a modern action flick, what do you expect to see?  A lot of action and special effects, and little of everything else.  Translate that to a gaming medium, and you get John Woo’s Stranglehold.  A lot of cool special effects and action, and a little of everything else.

Graphically, the game holds up well with all other modern 360 titles.  Character models look great; environments are detailed; textures are defined.  Even the voice acting matches up with the mouth movements.  The explosions look real, and the death animations are pretty bad-ass to watch, especially with the precision aiming feature (more on that later).

Also, sound-wise, the game sounds great.  Everything sounds like it should.  This is meant to be a realistic game, and it sounds like real life explosions should (trust me, I’ve been in lots of fire fights).  Either way, Stranglehold’s appearance holds up wonderfully.

What it lacks in is gameplay.  The appeal of Stranglehold is supposed to be the amazing gunfights and bad-ass moves of the protagonist, Detective Tequila.  Spinning around, firing at multiple enemies, killing everyone in his path.  And yes, Stranglehold delivers on that account, right from the start.  In the very first level, you have the ability to go Max Payne on your enemies, initiating bullet time effects and killing multiple enemies in one dive.

Well, that’s why I liked the first level.  This game is built on gimmicks: bullet time; super accuracy; bullet dodging.  You know, everything you like about action movies.  The first couple time you encounter these gimmicks, they’re awesome.  You feel 2 feet taller, and 30 pounds of muscle heavier.  The next couple times you encounter them, you want to feel cooler, but it feels the same.  Then the next times you encounter them, you’re bored and want to play more Halo 3.

These fun-at-first gimmicks are fun, but nothing can distract you from the simple gameplay.  Enemies literally just appear from nowhere, stand in one place, and shoot at you.  Sure, this makes it easy to knock three down while sliding down a rail, like aforementioned, this gets old: really old when you’re getting shot at from an enemy on some balcony you can’t quite see, and he won’t move anywhere, just waiting for you to kill him.  Enemies will appear out of nowhere.  You might clear an area, meaning to move on to the next when random stationary enemies appear firing on you from buildings you’ve already cleared.  It’s even annoying on normal mode.

Essentially, Stranglehold delivers on everything it promised.  Cool looking action moves.  When you use the precision shooting ability, you get to shoot enemies anywhere you want and watch them die.  It’s loads of fun the first few times.  Once you realize there’s nothing really revolutionary in this game, and the A. I. is boring, bordering on frustrating, you’ll want your $60 back.  Get at least one friend to buy or rent this game, because all it’s worth is a rental, cause after beating it once and gaining the achievements, you won’t really need to play the game again, especially with the other titles out right now.