craveonline

By Fred Topel

They've been trying to simulate John Woo movies in video games for a while, with Max Payne and Dead to Rights. They might as well just do a John Woo movie. How cool is it to actually have a sequel to Hard Boiled as a game you can play?

I don't usually watch cut scenes, because I just want to play, but this is a movie sequel. The English language is awkward but what were they going to do, subtitle Chinese? It's animated, so we're not in the photoreal place yet, but there are little details on faces and in backgrounds to take advantage of HDTVs. John Woo's cameo comes early for fans to spot. Ultimately I started skipping the plot talk to get to the action, but it's okay.

The game environments rock with all the bricks and cinders and their little cracks, to natural scenes with grass, water and rocks. There are gory head splatters and environmental destruction everywhere. Of course there are doves flying around too.

It's easy to slide around and dive John Woo style. It's pretty much automatic whenever you touch something that's slidable. If anything, it's too easy. Maybe you just want to blast guys and finish the job. You still have to aim as you dive though, so even on casual (easy) mode, there's still some work. Experts can try to be authentic Chow Yun-Fat.

"Tequila Time" is a lot easier to work with than Max Payne's bullet time. It's the same idea of slow motion, like the John Woo movies, but it often happens automatically when you do the badass slides and dives, so you don't have to manually toggle it. It feels natural within the game.

The camera can get disorienting but on easy, you can withstand a lot of gunfire, and there seem to be health packs everywhere, so just go. This makes the game infinitely repeatable, because even when you know where everything is, you can just try different ways to blast people.

Like a Tony Hawk game, there are many permutations of cool combos you can do for style bonuses. You can walk UP railing! Tying together dives, slides, rail climbs, swings and more with spinning gunfire is the heart of the game. You can enjoy that on any level as seemingly infinite generic bad guys keep coming and need to be blown away. I'll probably go back and play missions like the casino and art museum so I can keep swinging on chandeliers and running up dinosaur bones!

The standoff minigame finally makes sense of the ultimate Hong Kong movie cliché. You actually have to dodge and aim while you take out the stander-offers one at a time.

Bosses require many different moves within a single environment to take out, and they still have henchmen coming at you. This adds another layer of strategy, having to take out a single target while dodging fire.

If you're ever overwhelmed by attackers, it seems like there's usually some environmental aid around that can help you take them all out in one shot. Like a movie, you could argue the reality of certain things. Like how many snipers actually stand by explosives? But it's all in fun.

Some levels get repetitive as they keep going and going having you do the same thing, when you really just want to move onto a save point, or (gasp), stop playing for a while. It gets too complicated for its own good sometimes, like the helicopter level. What fun is it when you can't center your aim and you're vehicle is moving in the opposite direction? Sometimes it's hard to see where the gunfire is coming from, even with the arrows directing you to turn around.

Mainly though, I had so much fun playing Stranglehold, I really see it as more like Shoot 'Em Up: The Game. You get to use the environment and look badass to take out your enemies. Critics always say action movies are just like video games, so now it is.