Some games go out of their way to try and push the envelope of gaming - either technologically or as a form of art - and some just use the available technology and mould it to fit their goal of providing a package of mindless fun. Stranglehold is firmly standing in the latter camp, where content and fun drives the development and the technical details are secondary to the game. What you get is a tight package of M-rated, over-the-top gun play without any pretences for a deep and involving storyline - and there is nothing wrong with that.

The circle is now complete

Stranglehold is a third person shooter with more than slight similarities to the superb Max Payne series by Remedy Entertainment. Some have already commented how Stranglehold "liberally borrows" elements of gameplay from Mr. Payne's bag of tricks, but it should be noted that the full title of Stranglehold actually is "John Woo Presents Stranglehold", and a major inspiration for the gun ballet of Max Payne was, of course, John Woo and his films. You could say the circle is now complete - John Woo's Stranglehold taking inspiration from Max Payne, which in turn was inspired by, among other things, Replacement Killers - produced by John Woo. And today, almost ten years later, Woo is still the master of his genre.

John Woo actually did far more than just borrow his name and characters for a game - he personally owns the development studio responsible for Stranglehold, Tiger Hill Entertainment, and had a firm hand in producing the game; he aided in developing the storyline and actually directing the motion capture work for the game and the pre-animated scenes set in between the player-directed mayhem.

Story-wise, Stranglehold is a sequel to Hard Boiled - the plot revs up as someone is killing cops in Hong Kong, and Inspector Tequila sets out on the case. After a trashed marketplace and drug laboratory "cleanup" by Tequila, all done in his usual non-subtle way with piles of dead bodies everywhere, the plot gets twisted by the kidnapping of the daughter and granddaughter of one of the Hong Kong's crime bosses. Tequila is very much personally tied to the events as he was involved with the very same daughter ten years earlier, and the granddaughters' father is none other than Inspector Tequila. Cue complex family drama (with yet more guns) as Tequila sets out to chase the Russian mobsters who hold the girls hostage.

Style is everything

Inspector Tequila has an array of moves he can pull off while thinning out the masses of random thugs that keep pouring to his path. To use these moves the player has to fill up the Tequila Bomb bar. This is done by collecting style points, handed out for performing fancy kills; and trust me, Stranglehold is all about blowing away the bad guys in style.

Do a simple headshot, and you might get two or three stars. The same take-down, while sliding down a rail, might give four stars and combining dives, swings, jumps off the walls and slides over tables with trick shots (that trigger falling debris which takes out a bad guy) can rack up to five stars in style - the better your style, the faster your Tequila Bomb meter fills up.

Tequila starts out with the Health Boost ability - with a quick tap he can convert some of the Tequila Bomb bar to fill up the health bar for those tight spots where no health packs are in sight. In the first few levels Tequila also unlocks three other abilities; Precision Aim, Rampage and Spinning Attack. Precision aim slows time down to almost a standstill with a quick zoom centered on the crosshairs - this allows Tequila to place a perfect shot on an enemy, and the camera then follows the bullet through the air until it slams to the enemy with plenty of blood and suitably overacted reaction to the hit. A hit to the head often ends with the thug holding his face after half of his brains just got blown out. Silly, but fun.

Rampage starts out with Tequila making his best Max Payne facial impression while reloading his gun - he then enters a slightly slowed state of intense concentration with temporary invulnerability, greatly increased rate of fire and infinite ammo - and for a few seconds, he really lets it rip. Great for rushing into new target rich environments.

The fourth special move requires a nearly full Tequila Bomb bar and is the ultimate tool in clearing up rooms full of bad guys. Spinning Attack sends Tequila spinning around in slow motion, firing all around him while a flock of white doves(!) appears as on-cue around him. The camera cuts to every enemy around him as they are rapidly taken out by the hail of bullets - with liberal amounts of blood flying around.

In addition to these special moves, Tequila has a separate and constantly refilling bar for Tequila Time - Stranglehold's version of Bullet Time. By default, it's automatically triggered when Tequila is dodging or sliding across a rail or table with a hostile near his sights, allowing easier aiming for those stylish shots. You can also activate Tequila Time manually with the right mouse button to slow down time when you need that extra edge to rapidly plug enemies full of holes. In short, it works just like Bullet Time on Max Payne.

Everything is shot to pieces

As is customary in John Woo's films, everything around the hero gets shot to bits while the hero quickly moves from cover to cover trying to dodge the non-stop hail of bullets whizzing by. This is faithfully recreated in Stranglehold with the highly modified Unreal 3 engine. The modification is named "Massive D", and it allows complete and utter destruction on a whole new scale. Sure, in earlier games we've seen decals on the walls, boxes shattering to a cloud of debris that quickly vanishes, but Stranglehold takes things a few steps further to present authentic John Woo-style action.

While parts of the destruction is still "faked" with normal tricks such as decal work and sprite-based debris clouds, the developers have been very creative in the dark art of visual trickery. The cheats are mixed in with real breakup of objects and predetermined parts of the level and the combined effect works very well. And it's not just a couple of specific parts and objects - the engine actually supports the deconstruction of almost every object and big parts of the level geometry, with large chunks actually staying around. It's entirely possible to redecorate whole rooms in all kinds of creative ways while blowing away piles of bad guys.

As a side-effect, cover is not absolute - hide behind a pillar, and the bad guys will shoot it to pieces, with major chunks actually falling off and staying on the floor as physical objects. The same goes for overturned tables, statues, boxes and most other objects present.

Falling objects can also damage both Tequila and his opponents, and there are many "trick shot" spots indicated with a glow. Shooting these spots trigger a breakdown of the scenery object that might take out an enemy or two. In many places the thugs actually tend to stay in spots scripted up for such fancy kills, and it's all obviously set up that way. But hey, while it might feel a bit fake, it is immensely stylish and cool - and stays true to the John Woo films.

No gamepads, this is the PC

Refreshingly, the game is fully ported for the PC as far as the controls go. All references in the game relate to the keyboard and the mouse - up to the point that the game actually doesn't support gamepads at all. In a way this is surprising, as I always thought that Xbox 360 pad support was part of the Games for Windows certification, and the game is GFW-tagged.

Difficulty level is also adjusted with the controls. While on the Xbox 360 at casual level the thugs truly could not hit the broad side of a barn, on the PC they have regained some accuracy, and on the normal level their numerical superiority starts to show. At times, even on the normal level, the game actually suggested me that I could always adjust the difficulty level down - obviously this was due to the intense difficulty and not due to the playskill of the reviewer. Obviously. [too right - Ed]

The unlockable Hard-Boiled level actually lives up to the name, and even with the super-accurate mouse aiming you are hard pressed at picking off the hostiles quickly enough to survive as the weather forecast includes intense hailstorm of bullets with a chance of local showers that include rockets and heavy machine gun fire.

Beautiful destruction

Visually, Stranglehold is a bit of a mixed bag. Overall, the style and look works for me: the main thing - utter mayhem and destruction of everything possible around you - is portrayed well enough, and the levels, while heavily scripted and "on rails", look mostly very nice and work well with the gameplay.

The game mixes up pre-rendered clips with in-engine cutscenes pretty well. Again, on the consoles it is almost impossible to spot what's pre-rendered and what's in-engine, as the pre-made scenes are also created with a style very close to the actual game engine. On the PC at high resolutions, the difference is easier to spot, but the jump between pre-rendered video and real-time graphics doesn't distract from the story or the action.

During the action, the most obvious visual flaw comes from developing for the capabilities of the Xbox 360. The game is very much designed to be played at 720p, and at higher resolutions on the PC the low-res user interface elements and the wildly varying overall texture resolution stands out. While character textures and some detail elements are done at very high resolution, many secondary background elements are textured at the lowest possible resolution that looks acceptable at 720p.

The problem here is that the material, which looks fine at 720p, tends to stand out at on the PC screen when the resolution is bumped up to 1600x1200 or higher - at times, like a sore thumb. All common normal and widescreen resolutions are supported and in fact, if at all possible, Stranglehold should be played using a widescreen TV; that way the visuals look noticeable better than on a "too good" PC monitor. Another way to hide the rough spots is to play at a lower resolution, assuming you are using a CRT or a TFT that has good scaling for non-native resolutions.

In addition to the texture flaws, the lighting feels also a bit "off" at times. Overall the game is too brightly lit and at times it feels like all the effort has gone into modeling and texturing all the bits and pieces that make up the levels, and lighting has been thrown in as bit of an afterthought.

Serious hardware not optional

Another reason for playing at a low resolution might be the hardware requirements. Stranglehold on the PC is a complete 1:1 port of the Xbox 360 as far as the visuals go. No low resolution texture settings, no simpler shaders for low end cards - the only graphical options are the resolution switch, the enabling of dynamic shadows and the use of decals. While dynamic shadows do affect the frame rate, in practice Stranglehold has exactly one meaningful graphics option - the resolution you play in.

When the minimum requirements were first published, they were met with disbelief - in part because they were highly unusual. People reacted in shock to the requirement of a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM, and these were discounted as implausible when the video card was set at "GeForce 7800 / Radeon X1300 or higher". As X1300 is nowhere near GeForce 7800 in performance, the requirements looked bogus. Then Midway quickly moved in, stating that they were "preliminary". To mix things up even more, a pre-sale box on display in some stores actually sported completely different and much lower minimum requirements.

The final box has the same requirements that were originally reported on the Midway forums - and believe or not, they are actually very realistic. This thing eats baby PCs and keeps asking for more. While a dual core CPU is not strictly required, it's an easy way to indicate the minimum CPU. Only the fastest available single core CPUs can manage to run the game without hitting a CPU limit wall when the action heats up, and the Unreal 3 engine uses all available cores, so a slower dual core CPU can run the game better than a fast single core one.

2GB RAM is also the practical minimum; with Windows XP, you can get away with just 1.5GB, but no matter what, we could not get the game to start with just 1GB. You get to the opening menu, but as soon as you load the first level the game simply hangs with a black screen, and with the Vista's customary "add 512MB for the operating system shiny" rule, the 2GB RAM requirement on the box is accurate.

Shader Model 3.0 in full use

As is common with the games using the latest Unreal engine, a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card is required to get the game up and running. The requirements are close to reality in this regard if you ignore the X1300 snafu. Yes, the game starts on an ATI Radeon X1300, but with the frame rate dipping to single digits at 1024x768, it just isn't playable unless you fancy playing at 640x480. An NVIDIA GeForce 7800 on the other hand can easily handle things around 30fps with up to 1280x1024 resolution. We set the YouGamers minimum slightly lower with a Radeon X1800 GTO or GeForce 7600 GT, as they also managed to stay above 30fps in most situations at 1024x768 and the game felt fully playable. At the high end, the sky is the limit. The YouGamers recommended system (using a Radeon HD 2900 XT or GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB) is pretty much what you need for a solid 45-60fps experience at high resolutions, and the game is very much video card limited when you bump up the resolution.

I'm skipping the customary comparison shots for minimum and recommended systems simply because the game looks the same across the hardware spectrum - if the thing starts, you get effectively the same visuals as with the best systems out there. The only variable is the resolution as the dynamic shadows don't really alter the performance that much.

Stranglehold also requires 15GB of hard disk space, and comes on two dual-layer DVD9 disks. While we couldn't verify the stories that some digital download versions of the game would actually require up to 50GB of space during install, I can confirm that the retail boxed game will install happily as long as you have that 15GB on any one of your drives.

Solid action, as long as it lasts

While Stranglehold is a bit on the short side, providing about eight to ten hours of action, there are unlockable features enticing you to give it another spin, and the additional Hard-Boiled difficulty level provides quite a challenge for those who think they are tough enough. A multiplayer mode is also included, but unfortunately there was not enough time to give it a proper testing. Surprisingly, it seems to have tackled the problem of bullet time in multiplayer - with the game actually slowing down for everyone. It's much more limited than in single player, but it is there and it works; the rest of the Tequila Bomb moves have also been translated to the multiplayer with small tweaks to make them fair, and the levels break up to pieces just like in single player.

When everything is said and done, Stranglehold delivers what it promises - plenty of action and destruction worthy of John Woo's name on the box. If your system is up to date, Stranglehold on the PC is probably the best version of the game simply due to the controls. Games like this were made for the mouse & keyboard combination, but while the PC beats Xbox 360 here, both versions do feel slightly clumsy to play as the hero isn't quite as nimble as you might expect. I guess the best way to describe this small flaw is to say that Stranglehold can't quite match Max Payne in the playability department [or its hardware requirements - Ed].

In any case what little it loses in playability it fully makes up in the sheer scope and totality of the destruction presented. Visually the PC and console versions are nearly identical, and the only downside is that some bits look noticeably low resolution when played at a high resolution on a powerful PC. The game actually looks a lot better in motion than in screenshots - simply because you don't have time to worry about small visual imperfections while dodging all the bullets that are flying around you.

Special Edition versions of the game on Xbox 360 and PS3 come bundled with a copy of the Hard Boiled movie in the US, but no such edition is available on the PC - probably due to licensing issues.