Back in the early 1990s, action movies here in the US were in a real rut. Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal flicks were drowning out the real martial arts films, and most of the movies with guns were still stuck in the 80s with goofy hair and one-liner jokes that were not remotely funny (but unlike a lot of 80s movies, not so horrible that they became unintentionally funny). Then John Woo comes along with his movie Hard Boiled, starring Chow Yun-Fat, and got immediate cult classic status with its inventive and unique Hong Kong setting, great gunplay, stylish action sequences, and a flair that no one else seemed to have. Since then we've seen many movies borrow from Hard Boiled and Woo's other Hong Kong films like The Killer and the A Better Tomorrow series (all starring Chow Yun-Fat as well), but it's been a while since we've seen these two guys get together for anything else.
And that's where the new action game Stranglehold comes in. Developed by Midway, presented by John Woo, and starring Chow Yun-Fat (both his voice and his likeness is in), this video game sequel to the original Hard Boiled reproduces the look of the 1992 movie and brings great acrobatic shooting back to action games. Featuring destructible environments and the same Hong Kong gangster style, it looks like it could be a worthy cross-media sequel.
In Stranglehold you get to play as Inspector Tequila and do most of the cool stuff that was seen in Hard Boiled. Along with the ability to go into the slow motion "Tequila Time", you can bust out some excellent and satisfying shots with your weapons and even pull off some acrobatics that Max Payne wouldn't have ever dreamed of. And you're going to need all these moves, because Stranglehold is not an easy game. Multiple enemies will be coming at you from all directions, often simultaneously, so you'll need to finish people off quickly and find the best angles to get maximum firing effect.
One of the best features in this game is the very destructible environment. We're not talking blowing holes in the wall like in Red Faction, but when it comes to concrete pillars, fruit stands, outdoor markets, and the various clutter around in the back-room buildings of Hong Kong, it's pretty good stuff. From huge dives to the ability to easily and quickly hop over obstacles, this game is about moving Inspector Tequila and pulling off ridiculously stylish kills, often in slow motion, to win.
The PC version I got to try had an Xbox 360 controller connected to it, and to the game's credit it was just like playing on a 360 where the interface was concerned. All of the tooltips showed the right controls for things like diving, shooting, hitting your "Tequila Bomb" abilities, and more. And the controls are good, since the left trigger is your catch-all button to interact with the environment. If you are out in the open, pressing left trigger will send you diving, in slow motion, in the direction that you're moving in. Hit it when you're moving towards the wall, and Tequila will jump against the wall, plant his feet, then go into a big dive in the opposite direction - but you can also turn while doing this so that you can easily come out from behind a corner with a lot of air time (with a barrage of bullets flying, of course).
The left bumper button sends Tequila behind cover. Now, you can use this when up against a wall like you've seen in plenty of games, but you can also hold the button as a sort of secondary interaction button to create cover for yourself. Run up to a table with the LB held, and Tequila will kick it over and get down behind it. There are plenty of other context-sensitive uses around each level which you'll need more and more as the game goes on.
Stranglehold doesn't really have that many incredibly new ideas when it comes to action games, but considering how much the "action" genre owes to Hard Boiled, it's interesting to have the "official" video game version of these classics. And all of the John Woo hallmarks are there, many of which are in the cutscenes and in Inspector Tequila's special moves. The best of these has got to be the one where he automatically spins around firing his guns, with doves magically appearing and flying around, as everyone in the room dies. While it'd be nice to actually be able to control it yourself, I can't complain too much because it still looks great. If that's not enough, you can even pull off slow-motion shots where once you fire a shot, the action slows down to almost nothing and the camera follows the path of the bullet to its target. This can result in some pretty nasty kills, especially when you pull off shots in the head or crotch. There's also the option of taking people out by shooting nearby propane tanks and signs above their heads, which in this demo seemed to happen a lot, specifically with those two types of items. Sure, the resulting physics "experiments" were pretty fun, but hopefully the full game has a wider range of environmental objects to take people out with.
In this demo, Stranglehold didn't have any conventional boss battles. Instead, Tequila gets surrounded by enemies and has to do a sort of mini-game where the player must aim and fire with their right stick and can only lean either left or right to dodge incoming bullets. When you finish one guy, you will switch to the next. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be thought out too well, as it seems goofy to have to only fight one guy at a time when the whole point of it was to make it seem like you're surrounded by enemies. If these showdown sequences get better as the player progresses, great; otherwise they seem to be the weakest part of the game.
I have a couple of doubts about the PC version that I got to play. The first of which has to do with the controls. This demo almost seemed hardwired to play with an Xbox 360 controller, and the full version of the game is not going to go over well if the mouse and keyboard controls aren't as good. There'll be no reason that this game can't do well on a traditional PC control setup, so we will have to see. Second and most importantly, though, is the frequent hitching and pausing for one to two seconds at a time that the demo was doing. It seemed at first like it was trying to dynamically load up new rooms, but it's not like Stranglehold has some huge amount of detail or anything. The fact that the game didn't really stop while it was doing this was also rough as well, as the action kept going and I'd wind up getting hurt since I couldn't dodge incoming bullets while the game was momentarily frozen. I'm hoping this was just an issue with the demo that's already fixed, or that the PC this was playing on had some kind of issue. For the record, the Xbox 360 demo on the Live Marketplace doesn't seem to have this issue.
While Stranglehold won't likely be winning any Game of the Year awards, it does look like it'll accomplish what John Woo and the developers at Midway are setting out to do: create an authentic video game sequel to the legendary action movie. With copious amounts of slow motion, diving, interacting with the environment (like sliding down a handrail, or laying on a cart as it rolls, guns blazing the whole time), destroying the environment, destroying mobs of gangsters, and enough akimbo pistols to satiate any dual-wield fan, this game focuses on making the action as fun as possible more than anything else. Whether or not that fun can be kept up as the difficulty ramps up, we're not sure, but we'll find out soon when the game hits stores on PC, PS3, and 360 this month.
