Now this is a curious one. By 2007 “bullet time” was no longer a hot new thing, in fact the last official The Matrix game was already 2 years old, while The Matrix Online was just 2 years away from closing. John Woo has also been long past his prime and Hard Boiled, the original movie the game is a sequel to, was from 1992. Heroic bloodshed and gun fu/gun kata were no longer popular either. So why is it exactly Stranglehold came to be is a bit of a mystery. But if nothing else, this title was ambitious and it does impress in many ways.
As mentioned, this game is an official sequel to the classic Hong Kong action movie Hard Boiled – a title that influenced a lot of action cinema and video games for years to come. What Stranglehold attempted to do, was to make all of the crazy acrobatic, stylish and physics defying action goodness of the classic “heroic bloodshed” movies interactive to a greater extent than what other titles attempted before. Thus, they made a lot of elements of the level destructible and interactive, made every move look and feel “cool” and extremely dramatic and designed every combat encounter to feel as if you’re defying death every second of it.
For the first several levels, this works wonders. You drop signs and statues on enemies, ride carts in slow motion while shooting all around yourself, slide down the railings and dodge bullets in close-quarter shootouts. The levels are a bit samey, the encounters are more or less boring arenas, but because everything constantly explodes all around you and enemies pour from every opening all the time, you rarely stop to think. You just shoot, trying to make it look as cool as possible and also to survive. The basic “special abilities” that you get are pretty helpful too, so even as you get to a typical for the era turret section, you don’t feel bored. Enemies die just quick enough to not get annoying, but also run at you in such quantities, that they are a threat not just a nuisance. And situations are crazy and varied so you’re excited to see what’s going to happen next.
Sadly, about halfway through, the game decides that it wants to be “challenging” and does it in the dumbest way possible – by making enemies die slower, while dealing more damage. And after that point, the farther, the more obnoxious every encounter becomes. Instead of a fun destructive ballet around a band playing jazz, you find yourself shooting a random crook with a shotgun in the face 3 times at point blank and not understanding why are they not dead yet. Levels, for all of their creativity in situations, become far less interesting to dance around too, with less cool and crazy destructible or interactive objects and paths and a more generic third person shooter arena design. By the end, I could barely stand the stupidity levels the game went to in terms of making everything take many hits, while not giving you any fun ways to deal with the problem. Just tedious ones.
So, while it is an impressive title, which does have plenty of really cool ideas and at its best (during the opening levels) feels fluid and exciting, it’s also a frustrating one. Because it loses all flavor and fun by the end and becomes simply annoying to go through. All while the story is expectedly as generic as it gets. It’s a curiosity for anyone interested in developing an action title, but otherwise, I wouldn’t recommend playing it.
P.S. I’ve played the game with a mod that unlocks the widescreen, as the title was 4:3 only. Luckily it’s an early Unreal Engine 3 title, so widescreen support isn’t difficult to add, but it did make some cutscenes look a bit odd, because I could see characters spawn outside of the area that is supposed to be seen in 4:3.