The Museum Of Modern Thinking

I’m a big John Woo fan, but to be honest I do find his Hollywood films a bit overdone - I believe he was ruined slightly by Hollywood, and it took some of the nuttiness of his style, although Broken Arrow came close to his earlier films.

I much prefer his earlier work, films like God of Gamblers, The Killer and Hard Boiled. All three films star Chow Yun Fat, one of the largest Asian movie stars, and in Hard Boiled, he played an Inspector nick-named Tequila, working with an undercover cop to take down some gun-running mobsters.

Being a John Woo film, it is filled with slo-mo gunplay, slo-mo pigeons, unspeakably evil bad guys (although Mad Dog, though obviously Mad, had honour) and lots of two-gun leaps and rolls. I remember seeing Hard Boiled in a cinema in London’s Chinatown (the Prince Charles cinema, I think), and loving every minute of it’s hyper-kinetic balletic ballistics. Being young and impressionable, I guess some part of me wanted to be Chow Yun Fat…

Fifteen years later, thanks to next-gen consoles (and high-specced PCs), talented developers and the involvement of certain people, we have Midway publishing John Woo’s Stranglehold, where you take the role of Inspector Tequila and what can be best described as a sequel to Hard Boiled. I could give plot details, but what’s more fun is the gunplay, the dives, the totally outrageous action, Tequila-time (ok, ok, bullet time), the cutscenes, it’s all good Here’s the trailer via YouTube showing some great gameplay footage, as it will explain it much better than I can:

So, the demo was available last week sometime, so I downloaded it and had a go. Loved it. LOVED IT. Just total mayhem, jumping around, doing my best to take down the bad guys as I’m flying through the air / sliding on the floor / running up railings. The Tequila bombs are a lot of fun as well - the more stylish kills you get, the fuller the Tequila bomb gauge gets. When certain icons are highlighted, nifty abilities come into play: Health heals you, natch; Precision shot lets you target certain parts of enemies’ anatomy from a distance; Barrage just lets you cut loose for a period of time with unlimited; and the final bomb is sort of a smart bomb, sending Tequila spinning around with his guns blazing, taking out all the bad guys - with slo-mo pigeons in the background, of course.

Just a tip - you have to play through the demo twice (without powering off the console) to unlock the last two Tequila bombs and the extra difficulty levels. There’s also one-shot-kill pistols in the demo, along with some SMGs hidden in the last section behind a broken fence on the left-hand side.

In summation, I’ll be buying it - the demo has pulled me in good and proper, and the game’s a lot of bloody fun