A solid Max Payne-esque shooter with stylized action.
So pretty much, I summarized this game in the headline. Take the wealth of bullets, blood, and shooting third-person action of Max Payne and you can imagine what Stranglehold is like. It basically revolves around a cop (Chow) out to save a couple of hostages (his wife and some other girl). I didn't really pay much attention to the story, in fact I skipped it all, mainly because the action is so great and it just breaks the flow. Not to say the story is bad, though.
Let me go over the basic controls. You can dive, shoot, change weapons, use Tequila Time (Bullet-time) as well as Tequila Bombs (more on this next). Most of it is self-explanatory except the Tequila Bombs. Basically you use the d-pad to activate these abilities.
Your first ability is basically a med-pack, which you press left and get a boost of health when not near an actual pack. Up gives you precision aim, where you zoom in and pull off precise shots, and are then treated to a single-shot kill as well as a cinematic death. Right gives you barrage, where the weapon your holding becomes automatic and you don't lose ammo, as well as makes you invincible to almost everything; this lasts a couple seconds but I rarely use it. The final ability is down, which gives you a mini-cinematic where you spin around, when it's over all the enemies in the room are dead.
You acquire the "fuel" I'll refer to it as by killing enemies on style. Style-based kills can be anything from shooting while jumping in bullet-time to swinging from a chandelier and killing.
You use these skills, as well as the awesome destructible environments (almost everything can fall apart to some extent) to destroy your enemies. You can carry two weapons and kind of cruise through doing missions. It's all very linear, but how you can kill your enemies is anything but. There are 7 levels to play, which leads to about a 5-6 hour experience. The levels start out long and kind of recede in length by the time you reach the last one. And with 4 different difficulty levels (the hardest unlocking when you beat the game once) it can become very difficult and actually add real strategy.
The multiplayer, from my experience, nobody plays anymore. It's actually pretty fun, you can use your Tequila Bombs, and the levels are torn right out of the single-player. It's very fast-paced but with only two game modes (Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch) it's no surprise it lost momentum. Because of this, I feel insulted I would have to pay 1,200 MS points to get the downloadable content achievements and the 10 maps.
The achievements, to go into detail, are pretty varied and fun to get. You have your "beat the game on x difficulty" ones (which stack, that's nice) as well as multiplayer achievements, and finally the "kill 50 enemies while hanging from a chandelier." It doesn't make you go crazy, and they should be easy to pick up within a week if you have a boosting partner. As far as the replayability of Stranglehold goes, if you go for all the achievements you will be pretty much done with this game. You have to play through the story twice (once on any then again on Hard Boiled) and the aforementioned mp achievements will sustain you long enough.
I hope you enjoy the review, and I'd recommend either getting this game from GameFly or renting it; but I'm also sure it's a very nice, cheap price by now so it could be worth a buy. Probably under $20 anywhere you look, and $15 off of GameFly, used, to keep it permanent.
[I originally reviewed this game on GS; May 16th, 2008.]