Stranglehold: What Dead to Rights 2 should have been.

Seven years ago, third person action games broke into the scene with the likes of Max Payne and Dead to Rights; testing our trigger fingers and testing our tolerance for “bullet time” slow-mo game play that allowed us to put 500 holes through our potential enemies.

Flash forward to the present with Stranglehold and it still feels like we are doing the same thing, only with the obvious graphic enhancements and star power by the likes of Chow Yun-Fat. Much like the other games in years past we can only be somewhat impressed by the one man VS fifty guys with rocket launchers formula and helicopter gunnery mow down scenes.

Stranglehold does feature solid game play and even a decent multiplayer mode. I could not suggest spending sixty dollars on the this game, but it would be a perfect pickup for the weekend to shoot up some stuff, get some decent achievement points and return the game to which it came from in a few days. If your work week sucked, grab this game and take your aggression out on the poor hapless morons who can’t use bullet time.

Acclaimed action director John Woo presents Stranglehold, a stunning 3rd-person action adventure videogame for the PC. A “spiritual sequel” to Woo’s action masterpiece, “Hard Boiled,” Stranglehold redefines the action gaming experience with its acrobatic gunplay, thrilling cinematography, frenetic combat and incredible Massive Destructibility (Massive D). Chow Yun-Fat reprises his signature role as Inspector Tequila, pitting gamers as a take no-prisoners cop waging a personal war with Hong Kong crime lords. Tequila’s loyalties to the force are tested when his ex-wife is kidnapped by the Russian mob in Chicago. Tequila struggles to balance his duty to uphold the law with doing what it takes to save his family.