Stranglehold
Every month we celebrate the most important, innovative, or just plain great games from PlayStation’s past. This month, we get to enjoy the spirit of Hong Kong crime movies in violent slow motion, up close and very personal.
Usually, when movies and videogames collide, it’s a complete disaster – but this game was produced by Woo. “Woo who?” we hear you say, and you’re right to be excited. We are of course talking about Hong Kong cinema legend John Woo, director of classic movies such as A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, and Hard Boiled – to which this is an official sequel.
That’s right, Stranglehold the game is the sequel to Hard Boiled the movie. The only surprise, really, is that it took so long for somebody to make a videogame with John Woo’s name on it. His work has always had an incredible influence on English-language cinema and games. Quentin Tarantino names him as one of his greatest influences, and Woo had heroes diving athletically around in slow motion long before Max Payne was so much as a twinkle in a developer’s eye.
Truth be told, by the time Stranglehold made an appearance on shop shelves at the end of 2007, Woo’s influence had filtered down into the game industry so deep and for so long, it ironically had the appearance of being derivative. We’ve mentioned Max Payne; although the next game in that series wouldn’t arrive until 2012, the decidedly tongue-in-cheek slow-mo fest Chili
Con Carnage (for example) had been released earlier that year. Slow-motion gunplay was nothing new in games, and hadn’t been for many years.
WOO LOVE
Ultimately, that didn’t (and doesn’t) matter. The aim of the game was to make you feel like you were the hero in a John Woo action movie, something it achieved to a surprising degree. A third-person shooter was never going to capture his craft in full, of course, but it excelled at making the player feel powerful – and cool. As Inspector Tequila, you automatically vault over certain obstacles, while a tap of a button can see you slide down a banister, run up a fallen piece of scenery, or zoom along a zipwire. Target an enemy while doing any of this, and the slow motion (‘Tequila Time’) automatically kicks in. Needless to say, you can dive in any direction whenever you wish for similar slow-mo hijinks.
YOU CAN DIVE IN ANY DIRECTION WHENEVER YOU WISH FOR SLOWMO HIJINKS.
It certainly helps that Midway even managed to get Chow Yun-fat to reprise his role as Tequila. Perhaps you haven’t heard of John Woo, despite his brief stint in Hollywood (the highlight of which was the excellent Face/Off). Even so, you may recognise Chow Yun-fat, who is a more recognisable figure to Western audiences. English-language movies on his acting CV include Bulletproof Monk, The Replacement Killers, and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End. He also starred in a little movie you may have heard of called Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
While an appreciation for Woo’s work is necessary to get the most out of Stranglehold, the game holds up more than well enough without it. The destructible environment element, while again nothing new (it was most notably a major selling point of Black, which had been released two years earlier), was implemented in an interesting way. It wasn’t subtle; destructible support struts are helpfully coloured bright yellow, and there are exploding barrels aplenty dotted around the environments. That’s the point, though. This is a game that laughs in the face of nuance, and tells subtlety to go cry to its momma.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the abilities powered by your style meter. You can stylishly snipe from afar, temporarily enjoy infinite ammo and invincibility, and unleash a spin attack that takes out every enemy in the area with style. Stranglehold is to this day a joyous, stylish, and enjoyable love letter to Hong Kong action cinema, helmed by one of its most outstanding directors.