Introduction

Much like Unreal Tournament 3, we have been waiting to play John Woo’s Stranglehold for a long time. We saw this 3rd-person action game from Midway in a pre-rendered trailer at E3 2005, then at E3 a year later we saw a live game demo of the title’s impressive destructible environments via a shootout in a Hong Kong tea room. Last week at Midway’s Gamer’s Day event we finally got to play Stranglehold for ourselves in a lengthy demo set in a natural history museum Chicago.


First, here’s a quick refresher course for those of you who are unfamiliar with the game. Stranglehold is a kind-of sequel to the 1992 action movie Hard Boiled, which was the last Hong Kong movie directed by action master John Woo before he moved to the US and directed such films as Hard Target, Broken Arrow and Mission Impossible II. The film starred Chow Yun Fat as police inspector Tequila and was full of John Woo’s signature action style; tons of weapons fire, acrobatic flying bodies and breakneck pace from start to finish. Woo collaborated with Midway’s Chicago studio on Stranglehold and Chow Yun Fat returns to voice his Hard Boiled role of Inspector Tequila.

The three level demo of Stranglehold we got to play at the press event was, as we said, rather lengthy. While there was a story plot point to go along with it (Tequila has to rescue his ex-wife and daughter from being held by the mob) it’s mainly an excuse to get the ball rolling and see all of the carnage in the game. On the surface, Stranglehold has some similarities to the Max Payne series of games but Remedy’s games only focused on a few enemies at a time. The demo for Stranglehold had our virtual Inspector Tequila going up against a ton of shooters (some mob flunkies along with some pseudo-military types). They came from all over the place during our demo; from corridors, doors and even sliding down ropes and crashing through skylight windows.


If you are at all familiar with Hard Boiled you know that the movie showed lots of arobatic moves by Chow Yun Fat as he dispatched the bad guys. Stranglehold allows the player to duplicate those kinds of moves, such as firing two weapons while sliding down a banister or leaping into the air to get head shots or even rolling on top of a wheeled cart to dispatch enemies. At one point in the press demo we leaped from a second story ledge and grabbed a hanging pterodactyl skeleton to use as a kind of swing to shoot at the bad guys. All of these moves were easily handled via the Xbox 360 controller (the game is also due for the PS3 and PC).