John Woo presents Stranglehold (Xbox 360, 2007)

In a gaming landscape where major titles try to be all things to all players, 2007’s John Woo presents Stranglehold makes for a nice throwback. The goal of the developers is simple, a power fantasy in which you shoot hundreds of besuited gangsters while looking cool. Stranglehold takes place over six levels, can be beaten in about five hours and was well worth the 50p I paid for it at CEX.

As you can probably guess from the title, John Woo’s fingerprints are all over the game (and he pops up as a very polite bartender). Chow Yun Fat reprises his role from Hard Boiled as the improbably named Inspector Tequila and proceeds to spend much of the game in slow motion with bullets lazily spiralling past his head.

Your time is spent blasting through a series of gun-fu playgrounds. You’ll run in slow motion over the backs of golden dragon statues in a Chinese restaurant, swing from chandeliers and (the definite highlight in my opinion) run up the back of a Brachiosaurus skeleton. You do all this while toting guns that never need to reload while the game displays a frankly pornographic focus on bullet impacts on flesh and the environment.

If you’re not sold yet, there’s a special attack in which the camera spirals around Chow Yun Fat doing his most determined face while reloading his weapon. He proceeds to spin around annihilating everyone in the room while doves fly out of nowhere. Is it possible to be more John Woo than this? No. It is not.

There is a bit of awkwardness to put up with due to the 2007 release. Graphics are sometimes a bit wonky, the camera is a little too close to your character, there’s a godawful turret section and the plot isn’t much to write home about. But Stranglehold is so brief n’ breezy that none of this makes much of an impact.

Good times all round. Shame that Midway Chicago never got to finish the sequel before Midway went under.