Stranglehold is Max Payne on ecstasy

As I regularly do I checked the demo-section on Xbox Live Marketplace yesterday and saw a newcomer; John Woo Presents Stranglehold, it rang a bell but I didn’t know much about it, so I wanted to try it out. It’s basically a game created by John Woo starring Chow Yun-Fat as some cop called Tequila. The easiest way to describe the game is to think of Max Payne fucked up on ecstasy; i.e. you have the bullet-time (although here it’s called Tequila Time), which activates if you aim at an enemy while diving through the air. Most of the demo takes place at small market places and they’ve added tons of destroyable objects, like water melons, baskets, wooden fences, etc., and everything is just flying everywhere when you’re in combat, it looks really cool in slow-motion and even though it’s filled with bugs, for example objects sitting in mid-air and stuff spinning around on the ground, it’s a lot of fun. The flow is very continuous; you almost never get stuck, if you run into low objects, like a table, Tequila will just quickly slide over it.

You can also slide along staircase railings and jump onto a trolley and keep shooting which is very cool. When you kill someone you get a style score, the more creative you are, the more score you get, for example instead of just shooting someone you can shoot the sign hanging above him and make it crash down onto him. When you get style score you rank up power you can use to heal yourself, make precision aims, which lets you target someone far away and then the camera follows the bullet in slow-mo, it looks incredibly cool because the game is very bloody so when the bullet hits it goes ‘KABLAM’ and blood starts squirting out while the enemy grabs his crotch (or wherever you want to hit him…), barrage, which makes it possible to fire very fast for a short while and spin attack, which isn’t in the demo, but I suppose Tequila spins around while shooting.

Another very cool aspect is dueling, sometimes you’re ambushed and you have to use your Matrix-like skills to get out it, time slow down and then you have to take out the enemies one at a time while you’re dodging the bullets coming at you. I don’t know if I’ll actually buy it, but the demo is worth a look.

Trailer.