Stranglehold is a run and gun shooter. You have the ability to take cover, but I don’t think I ever did. In the game you play Agent Tequila, Chow Yun-Fat, and you are essentially playing through the sequel to the movie Hard Boiled. You can definitely feel the John Woo influence on the game. It is what separates this from most other run and gun shooters. When you approach any obstacle you will automatically slide across it. Additionally, the left trigger is your dive/interact button. When you pull the left trigger you can dive in the direction you’re moving, slide down railings, jump off walls, and swing from chandeliers. During these moves any time you’re aimed towards an enemy, and there are plenty to aim at, the game automatically goes into slow motion letting you get a better shot. All of these pieces together make it feel like you are really playing through a John Woo movie.

Each kill you make during one of these moves is rated between 1 and 5 starts and those stars then power up your special meter. The special meter has 4 levels. At the first level you regain a little of your health. There are plenty of health packs around the levels so I seldom used it for this, but in a few tight spots it comes in handy. The second level of the special gives you a precision aim attack. When activated the game goes into slow motion and your aim zooms way in allowing you to make really accurate shots. Then, once you shoot the camera follows the bullet to the person showing the hit. The AI reactions are spot on to these hits as well. If you hit a guy in the leg he will start hopping around. If you hit him in the shoulder he’ll drop his gun and hold his shoulder in pain. If you hit in the head or chest it takes the guy down on one shot. The third level of special move is the barrage attack. When you use it you reload your gun and the game goes into slow motion again. Then, until your special runs out you stay in slow motion and your gun shoots really fast with unlimited ammo. This is great for rooms with a lot of enemies. Just activate barrage and charge them. Later in the game when you get the rocket launcher give the barrage attack a try with it because it is a blast to have unlimited rocket ammo. The final special attack is a spin move. You do a shooting spin move and it automatically hits the people around you taking them out. It is also really useful when you’re surrounded.

In addition to the run and gun game play there are a few points where you get cornered and have a stand off. In a stand off you can’t move you’re feet and the enemies can’t move either. You can lean side to side to dodge. So, once a standoff starts you basically dodge incoming bullets while taking out the enemies around you. I actually found the stand offs to be a lot of fun because in a lot of cases you could blow up stuff behind the enemies and take them out that way. The very last stand off in the game is pretty hard just because of how many enemies there were, but it only took a couple tries.

I did not bother playing any of the multiplayer. There are plenty of other great multiplayer games out right now so I did not spend any time with Stanglehold’s. For me this game was about playing through a John Woo movie and just having fun running and gunning.

Most of the achievements were all pretty strait forward for things like getting a set number of kills or completing a certain level. I got a large portion of them playing through the story the first time. I did play through a couple levels a second time to get a few specific ones, like 50 kills while handing on a chandelier.

I’d recommend renting Stanglehold. It is about a 7 or 8 hour play though, but it is still a lot of fun. I had a blast playing through it and doing all the kinds of crazy moves that only happen in the movies.