Better Late The Never: Stranglehold

So yeah,I've been out of the loop for a while, lots of crazy personal stuff including a shiny new job have put this blog on the back burner for a but, but that doesn't mean that I haven't been playing games rather non-stop.

I've recently worked my way through Stranglehold, the video game sequel to the John Woo 'Heroic Bloodshed' classic, Hard Boiled. 'Worked' is a literal term at times, as the game has an oddly schizophrenic difficulty level that threatened to bitchslap my sanity into oblivion, but by that point i was firmly entrenched and wasn't going to give in until Inspector Tequila got his revenge, or got out alive, or whatever it was that he was getting. As you could probably tell, I wasn't particularly enamored by the plot of this one. The thing that really got me engrossed in the life of Chow's gunslinging alcohol-fueled cop was the perfect John Woo-ness of the game. Sure, other games have come along before this one, waving the flag of Woo with reckless abandon (i'm looking at you, Max Payne, F.E.A.R., and even those shitty Matrix games) but this one, for whatever reason, just gets it so right.

In many games featuring Matrix-dubbed 'bullet time,' the slow motion advantage over your opponents is really its own reward. You're expected to use it because it looks cool and it makes the game easier, but that's really the only incentive. Stranglehold takes things a bit further, rewarding you in spades for making use of its various Wootastic moves. You gain style points for killing the bad guys using 'Tequila Time,' (really, why not call it 'woo-time?') more for doing so while diving, more for doing so while sliding down a banister, even more for doing so while rolling on a cart or swinging off a chandelier, and more for offing many baddies in a row while doing so. Style points do a few things for you. First and foremost, they charge the meter for your special moves (Which they decided to unsurprisingly dub, 'Tequila Bombs'), the more stylish the kills, the faster the meter fills. Second, they serve as the game's currency for buying unlockables, of which there are many. If that was somehow not enough incentive for you, the damage taken and dealt are subject to change based on how much style you're exhibiting at any given time.

I'm not sure I would recommend this game for a purchase though, since it's fairly brief and the multiplayer is pretty much forgettable. But for those few sweet hours, Stranglehold takes the Tony Hawk Rule (everything you do looks cool), jacks it to 11, then gives you a cookie every time you do it.