stranglehold for xbox360. I have it. I love it.
reminds me of max payne. Nothing too original here, but so far everything has been done very well.
There are some nice features, the game is based on John Woo’s genre-defining action movie, Hard Boiled starring Chow Yun-Fat. The game features Inspector Tequila and of course he is voiced by Chow. There is a feature called Tequila time, it’s basically slow motion ala the Matrix. Again, nothing original, but there are some nice add-ons, for instance, there’s a beserk mode (forget what it’s called), where your character can go on auto fire and if he gets hit during this time, he doesn’t lose any health, and you don’t lose any bullets. There’s the aim feature, where you can long distance aim at an enemy, if you hit them you see a nice animation. There are other features but I just got this on saturday.
the environments are pretty nice, I felt that there was a little more pixelation than I had expected based on the fact that it’s brand new and on the 360. The cut scenes are great, the voice acting is top notch, it’s inspired by a hong kong action movie, and you hear enemies speak in cantonese, for those who can’t understand it, well you’re missing out on being called an “idiot!” or “stupid” it’s small, but it adds to the experience.
I also really liked the inclusion of being able to ‘glide’ or ‘slide’ along elements in the environment, if you’re in a bar, you can dive over the bar and lean up against the inside of it. If you see a railing you can slide down it and shoot at enemies, doing this action automatically invokes ‘tequila time’ and it’s sweet when you can string together a few of these and finish off like 10 guys.
there’s another mode in the game, that you will encounter early on, where you’re faced with like 5 guys, all pointing guns at you, but they’ll allow you to face them one at a time, it’s called a mexican stand off. Everything is slow motion, you have to dodge the bullets standing still (you lean left or right), and you have to shoot and hit the enemy within a given time frame, once the time frame is over you move on to the next guy, anyone who is left standing after you still have to finish in real time.
The environments are really well done too, I felt like I was in Hong Kong, everyone is chinese, and so they should be!
The sound design is great, you can hear bullets wiz past you, in slow motion everyone talks slowly, and guns go off in slow mo, doors creak and crack, everyone speaks cantonese (obviously everyone speaks english as this is released in an english dominant region, but they also speak cantonese), and things generally sound the way they should.
The start menu even looks like a dvd start menu!
The things I didn’t like so far, is that you can’t jump, and the in-game graphics seem slightly less quality than I had expected.
Well worth the money, and so good so far that I am slightly regretting not shelling out the extra 10 bucks for the collectors edition.
if you are into 3rd person shooters like max payne, and/or you are into hong kong action movies chances are very good you’ll like this game.
Samurai.