So pretty much, I summarized this game in the headline. Take the wealth
of bullets, blood, and shooting third-person action of Max Payne and
you can imagine what Stranglehold is like. It basically revolves around
a cop (Chow) out to save a couple of hostages (his wife and some other
girl). I didn't really pay much attention to the story, in fact I
skipped it all, mainly because the action is so great and it just
breaks the flow. Not to say the story is bad, though.
Let me go over the basic controls. You can dive, shoot, change weapons,
use Tequila Time (Bullet-time) as well as Tequila Bombs (more on this
next). Most of it is self-explanatory except the Tequila Bombs.
Basically you use the d-pad to activate these abilities.
Your first ability is basically a med-pack, which you press left and
get a boost of health when not near an actual pack. Up gives you
precision aim, where you zoom in and pull off precise shots, and are
then treated to a single-shot kill as well as a cinematic death. Right
gives you barrage, where the weapon your holding becomes automatic and
you don't lose ammo, as well as makes you invincible to almost
everything; this lasts a couple seconds but I rarely use it. The final
ability is down, which gives you a mini-cinematic where you spin
around, when it's over all the enemies in the room are dead.
You acquire the "fuel" I'll refer to it as by killing enemies on style.
Style-based kills can be anything from shooting while jumping in
bullet-time to swinging from a chandelier and killing.
You use these skills, as well as the awesome destructible environments
(almost everything can fall apart to some extent) to destroy your
enemies. You can carry two weapons and kind of cruise through doing
missions. It's all very linear, but how you can kill your enemies is
anything but. There are 7 levels to play, which leads to about a 5-6
hour experience. The levels start out long and kind of recede in length
by the time you reach the last one. And with 4 different difficulty
levels (the hardest unlocking when you beat the game once) it can
become very difficult and actually add real strategy.
The multiplayer, from my experience, nobody plays anymore. It's
actually pretty fun, you can use your Tequila Bombs, and the levels are
torn right out of the single-player. It's very fast-paced but with only
two game modes (Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch) it's no surprise it
lost momentum. Because of this, I feel insulted I would have to pay
1,200 MS points to get the downloadable content achievements and the 10
maps.
The achievements, to go into detail, are pretty varied and fun to get.
You have your "beat the game on x difficulty" ones (which stack, that's
nice) as well as multiplayer achievements, and finally the "kill 50
enemies while hanging from a chandelier." It doesn't make you go crazy,
and they should be easy to pick up within a week if you have a boosting
partner. As far as the replayability of Stranglehold goes, if you go
for all the achievements you will be pretty much done with this game.
You have to play through the story twice (once on any then again on
Hard Boiled) and the aforementioned mp achievements will sustain you
long enough.
I hope you enjoy the review, and I'd recommend either getting this game
from GameFly or renting it; but I'm also sure it's a very nice, cheap
price by now so it could be worth a buy. Probably under $20 anywhere
you look, and $15 off of GameFly, used, to keep it permanent.
[I originally reviewed this game on GS; May 16th, 2008.]
