Stranglehold

It's a solid Max Payne clone, but given the talent involved, it should have been better: - While the environment is highly destructible, the mayhem never reaches the visual splendour and balletic elegance of other John Woo-inspired titles (namely Max Payne 2 and FEAR). - It's a fairly lazy console port offering next to no customisation options or mod support. - The guns sound like a woodpecker trying to poke a hole into a styrofoam board. - Slo-mo has an ugly sepia effect that can't be turned off. - John Woo's Hong Kong output excelled at telling dramatic stories about tormented protagonists. In contrast, the story in Stranglehold is mostly told in the following fashion: Enter level, kill boss, take phone from boss and read an SMS that details some hilariously convoluted plot that doesn‘t make a lick of sense. - Graphics haven't aged well: While Chow Yun-Fat‘s character model still looks really good, enemy NPCs are downright hideous. A lot of the environmental textures are surprisingly ugly and blurry. - It's very short: 6 levels total, you'll probably beat the thing in 4 hours or less. There's an unlock shop (staffed by none other than Woo himself) which may motivate you to do repeat playthroughs. - Zero innovation. I would have liked some features that harken back to Stranglehold's cinematic roots, like having a replay system, similar to what you'd find in a racing game, giving the player the opportunity to "direct" his own action movie. - No effort has gone towards restoring the multiplayer component. It's not that big of a loss, since multiplayer for Stranglehold was pretty much DOA anyway. It's still rather paradoxical to be able to unlock player models for a nonexistant multiplayer mode. On the positive side, enemies have special animations for getting shot in the balls. Some of the levels are really fun, with the casino being a particular highlight. Most importantly, you get to play as Chow Yun-Fat, so it has that going for it. Which is nice.

Amazing shooting, great physics and destructible environments, what else do you need? Also is working like a charm in modern systems. You can even play it in 4k or any othe resolution desired by adding "-ResX=X -ResY=Y" command line arguments. Change X and Y after = to the desired resolution width and height respectively. Only downside is the lack of controller support but is still a 5 star game

I had this on the Xbox 360 and always liked it. Always debated to get the PC version years ago when it was available, but never did. This surprise really made my day. At first I thought this would be one of those games locked to 30 fps because of how old it is. Well imagine my delight when I loaded this up and that intro scene that rotates around him with the gun fire in the bar was super smooth. I was like no way. Sure enough though, this game runs at 240 solid. I'm having a blast replaying this one, as it is so much more responsive and I can actually aim precisely this go round. I highly recommend this game if you are looking for a good linear, shooting action game, similar to Max Payne.

I found Max Payne 3 miserable, but Stranglehold is all the same balletic carnage without the constant griping. Tequila is essentially a superhero and he kills THOUSANDS of men in the course of the game, but you're allowed to enjoy the variety and beauty of the violence instead of constantly being chided for it. This is classic cop drama stuff, especially in the cutscenes, and I love it. Chow Yung Fat is a badass who seems to be enjoying recreating one of his most famous roles and everyone else is acting to the hilt: no phoning in here. I found the action a LITTLE stiff in places. Max Payne kept coming to mind in how smooth and ridiculously accurate he is, but the irony is that the more 'realistic' delay in Tequilla's maneuvers and slightly inaccurate firearms encourages the kind of blazing away the films this game is based on relish. You are SUPPOSED to fire a million times until your clip runs dry into a single enemy because it racks up the style points and shows off the physics engine. What are style points for? So you can kill even MORE enemies in MORE stylish ways. It will become repetitive like all things but the game has a nice pace, switches up venues, and isn't that long. This is a big greasy hamburger compared to a lot of games, but it's delicious and decadent and fun.