Bargain Bin Review: Stranglehold.

By pissedoffthewitch May 3, 2009 1 Comments

Taking heavy inspiration from the Max Payne franchise, and a sequel to john Woo's "Hardboiled" (not to mention he also collaborated on the game), you'd think you could take one glance at Stranglehold, and know exactly what it's all about... wait you can. Stranglehold knows exactly what it is, and except for a few twists on the gameplay, doesn't bother to try and be different.

    Chow Yun Fat provides both his voice, and likeness to the game in order to reprise his role as inspector Tequila, the tough on criminals, kind of cop.  Rather than shoot first, ask questions later, he doesn't even bother with the questions. A shooter can't be a good shooter unless all the destruction your causing looks pretty, right? There is allot of destructable environments, almost anything you can see, you can blow it to hell. As far the character modeling and the destructable environments go, that's about all that looks nice. You'll shoot the same enemy models over and over again, go through levels that rarely change things up. Even the blood splatters look kinda tacked on, looking more like you shout someone in the face with a paintball gun, instead of a shot-gun.

    Choosing you weapons of mass destruction will be easy, mainly because there aren't that many, and what are there, aren't very special. You'll find your shot-gun, assault riffle, two handed gun, and grenades half-way through the campaign. What Stanglehold does interesting using the environment to your benefit with ease. Hop onto a cart and blast foes, run up a rail and blast foes, hang from a chandelier and blast foes, but like the entire game, it plays out it's welcome half-way through.

    As for the Multi-player and story? Don't bother, the developer's obviously didn'tand finding a match in multi-player is point, no one is ever paying and it's pretty obvious why. There are only bare-bones in it, death match and team deathmatch are the only one I recall because those are the only ones i've played, but I hardly got to play, because when you do find a match, I highly doubt it will play smoothly.

    Stranglehold is able to put a small twist on what could have just been a  tedious game, but it's able to make itself just above mediocre, atleast in the single player department, but it faces that innevitable choke-point where the game stops being fun and starts becoming boring. You'll see everything there is to see within the first hour or so, after that... you get the point.

Deserving of the Bargain Bin statues?: Yes, but even at $20, I wanted my money back.

Who should play this?: People with an itchy trigger finger.

Average Critic score: 7.9

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