Stranglehold [X360]

Stranglehold's levels look superb, too. Tequila takes in a variety of locations during his killing spree, from Asian fishing villages to Chicago car parks to elaborate casinos. Each contains a delightful plethora of stuff to blow up. You'll be taking cover behind a concrete pillar as incoming shots take chunks out of it, or dodging falling sculptures in an art gallery, or shooting watermelons into a kind of red mist. As its heritage might lead you to expect, it's a very cinematic game.

But all this destruction isn't just window dressing. Some environmental features will take out enemies as they fall: rock slides, neon signs and exploding cars all prove useful tools. Likely targets are picked out with a sparkle effect, so there's no need to just destroy random things to find one that'll damage an enemy. Unless you want to, that is. More could have been made of this feature, as it's quite unevenly distributed about the levels, but when they show up they're great fun.

Stranglehold includes the almost compulsory set of multiplayer options, but the abilities that sparkle so much in single-player don't work so well online. You can't slow down time just for yourself, obviously, so much of the advantage of doing it is gone. It's nice to have the option, and it'll go some way to breaking up Stranglehold's often monotonous single-player levels, but it's more of an afterthought than a main course.

Monotonous single-player, you say? You bet. Stranglehold loves to pile on the objectives. Plant 42 C4 charges around this dock. Blow up 700 meth labs in this Hong Kong slum. You get the idea. Sure, this stuff's just there to provide some context to the combat, but Stranglehold doesn't exactly go out of its way to make life interesting.

Mind you, the combat is very nearly capable of carrying this game on its own. There's a real elegance in the way Stranglehold looks when a big firefight kicks off, an alluring character that's authentically John Woo and superbly stylish. Everybody loves to kick back and blow the crap out of stuff from time to time, and Stranglehold satisfies that need more than adequately.

But it's not the most sophisticated of offerings. There's not much here other than the destruction -- the levels are repetitive, and most encounters play out similarly. Little differentiates the game's weapons, and the plot is threadbare. Would Hard-Boiled be as good if it were stretched out into a eight-hour movie rather than a hundred minutes? Stranglehold is best played in similarly short bursts. Although it's a creditable adaptation of John Woo's cinematic style, it's a shallow experience among its video game peers.