Stranglehold

Excellent TPS from the mid-2000s. From the first minutes till the credits it's non-stop action. Destructible environments, bullet time, pigeons, endless gun magazines - all the staples of John Woo movies are recreated here with care, it's clear that the team behind this game was passionate fans of Hong-Kong action movies. Even Chow Yun-Fat reprises his role of detective Tequilla from Hard Boiled. It delivers in every way.

The game is very B-class and some level objectives aren't the most enjoyable, but it's pretty fun blast of senseless shooting nonetheless. It had quite impressive levels of destruction and ragdoll physics for its time. Visuals understandably show its age and FOV is too close, but otherwise all good. Also want to thank GOG for acquiring this in their lists.

Ran smoothly without crashes on my Ryzen 1700 RX 580 8GB. 60fps V-sync does not produce fps dips and there are minimal graphical glitches. There are no subtitles so I couldn't understand the story very well. You play as Chow Yun Fat as Agent Tequila and you go rogue investigating the deaths of your fellow cops which then spiraled into finding your daughter or lover from long ago. Anyway, it provides incentive for the game to move you from Hong Kong to Chicago and back. Killing enemies that attack you with different weapons and yadiyadada. Pro: I loved the cheesy shit that goes on in the cut scenes and the gameplay. It's almost as if the devs just pooled together all the ideas from the chow yun fat movies and just turned it up a notch. The slow mo gun play and destructible set pieces are very fun. The bad guys are hilariously cheesy and I loved it. The guns don't even have reloads so the momentum is very much maintained and the gameplay just keeps going. Love the combo meter it includes to fill up to unleash different levels of moves. Believe it or not, the facial animation at least for the main characters are top notch for a game that was released in 2007. I'd its better than some of the games that were released later. Con: No subtitle for me to figure out WTF is going on in the story. Game can be unforgiving in a checkpoint save system. Destructible set pieces that can be used against enemies were drastically reduced in later levels. It's almost as if they just included it in the earlier levels to sell to players in their demo. Sometimes there weren't enough hints to tell me where to go next. Recommend it to buy it on a discount to play through it once and forget it!

Stranglehold is a game with a singular purpose: to recreate a John Woo movie in video game form and it does this very well. It has also aged really well in the last decade and a bit since it’s initial release. The game play itself is still very fun. You have a variety of weapons to wield each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You can utilize a bunch of different environmental triggers in levels to kill enemies such as propane tanks; signs; etc. There are also a few special moves you can do such as precision aim, where you can zoom in to shoot your pistol in slow motion, or barrage where you go into a slow motion god mode where you can’t take damage and have infinite ammo. These abilities come into play mainly in boss or mini boss fights where the enemies have much more health than normal although I found precision aim useful against snipers as well. One thing I will mention about the weapons is that the shotgun is limited to 12 shells which is strangely low. I can have over a hundred rounds for the carbine; 200 rounds for the SMG; and over a hundred for the pistol; etc. I want to complain about the health of the bosses for a second here. I understand that boss fights are supposed to be more difficult but to see the only difference between them and a normal enemy be their massive health bar and doing more damage to you seems lazy. So many games do this as they also make the only difference in difficulty levels be health and damage. I wish more games would make enemies smarter not just bullet sponges. The graphics have held up pretty well as I mentioned. The object detail is pretty poor but the clothing and facial detail are both very good even after all these years. AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.2.6 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB || Linux Mint 20.3 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.4.0-100-generic | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz | Wine 7.3 | DXVK v1.9.4L-2

This game rules. 15 years after its release, it’s still a blast to play, and it remains a rare example of a movie-to-game adaptation done right. Stranglehold is short but extremely intense. It is often said to be a Max Payne clone, which seems reductive: sure, it’s a third-person shooter with slow-mo mechanics, but it feels a lot more “arcady”, and follows a very different design philosophy. It offers gunfight after gunfight and barely anything in-between, and lets you use a wider and crazier variety of cool moves. You can dodge mid-air! Jump and slide on handrails! Perform “special attacks” involving slow-mo and temporary invincibility! The gunplay is quite sleek and smartly implemented overall: everything is fun, works as intended, and does a great job of emulating the action scenes of Hard Boiled (and John Woo movies in general). Each combat is a glorious ballet of ultraviolence where everything and everyone explodes around you. It’s just beautiful. The story is fine but not too memorable, has only a few tie-ins to Hard Boiled, and mostly serves as a pretext to send you to kill bad guys. Graphically, it looks neither uniquely great nor bad for 2007 but the character animations are solid and the environments are pretty varied, believable and atmospheric – plus, they are destructible to a remarkable extent! Alas, the game has a few issues: the FOV is messed up and can only be fixed through a fan-made patch; I sometimes had trouble interacting with usable items and covers, since you need to get very close to them before pressing the “action” key, which is hard to do in the middle of a hectic gunfight; finally, enemies often spawn right behind your back and chew through your health in a few instants, which can be annoying. Fortunately, these problems never spoil the fun. So yeah, Stranglehold is an underrated shooter I’ll probably often come back to. If you love over-the-top action and want something to play over the course of the next weekend, look no further!