John Woo's Stranglehold (PC)

Tequila Sunrise

Being based on Unreal Engine 3, the overall game is actually very good looking, especially the animations for the enemies.

The world is very full and the physics engine compliments this extremely well, with walls crumbling away when shot at and tables and chairs smashing apart from explosions. The destructible environment allows for a completely immersive experience and you get a genuine sense of panic as the wall you are hiding behind is slowly eradicated by gun fire and you’re left to face a barrage of enemies with no protection.

Despite this there is no support for Ageia's PhysX PPU, so you won't see any benefits to owning one of those cards in Stranglehold. This is another UE3-based game that doesn't integrate PhysX enhancements... strange.

The voice acting on the whole is very good and echoes the film extremely well. The sound is very immersive and, in collaboration with the graphics and physics engine, creates an absorbing cinematic experience.


With the good things out of the way, it's time to look at some of the less-good things in Stranglehold's graphical armoury - the first being the fact that there are very few graphical options to play around with. This is probably down to Stranglehold being an Xbox 360 game first and foremost (and could also be the reason why there is no PhysX PPU support - Ed.).

When we say very few, we mean very few options - there is just a resolution option, along with the option to turn the decals on or off and the dynamic shadows. Unfortunately, neither of these makes any real difference and actually caused a few system crashes for us at points.

The game also can’t perform any anti-aliasing, so don’t expect everything to be looking as smooth as, say, Team Fortress 2. This is because the engine uses a filtering system called ‘multiple render targets’ that prevents it from feasibly being able to perform any anti-aliasing at all.

It's a similar situation to the one we found with BioShock, as it's based on the same engine. However, we've been told by Nvidia that it is working to enable anti-aliasing on both DX9 and DX10 codepaths in BioShock - hopefully this will mean all UE3 games will get the same support. While we mentioned DX10 in passing, it's worth mentioning that Stranglehold is strictly DirectX 9 only and, being based on UE3, that means you're going to need a card that supports Shader Model 3.0 - Radeon X850 owners need not apply.

Tequila Conclusions

Stranglehold is a remarkable, enjoyable and appealing game to play, but there are a few problems.

Although the gameplay is very immersive, mission objectives appear very arbitrary and pointless and once you’ve played around with all the special moves, which will take a good few hours, the situations you find yourself in become rather repetitive. This was especially true for me at the end of the third level. Instead of being sat on the edge of my seat in awe of how much I was owning; I noticed my body language had been reduced to slumping in the chair as I mowed down yet another wave of Triads.


My second problem with Stranglehold is about its stability problems. Playing on a retail version of the game, I suffered several system hangs and crashes throughout. I managed, by pure coincidence, to discover that a lot of the system hanging problem was due to my anti-virus software (Norton, for reference) but there was little I could do to fix the issue.

After searching around on the Internet, it appears that I was not the only one suffering problems with the game and several other people were complaining about bugs and questioning when a patch will come out to fix them. I attributed the temperamental nature of the game to the high system requirements, which needs a pretty high spec PC to cope; especially for a DirectX 9 game.

However, if your PC can handle it and you’re lucky enough to dodge any of the stability issues then I highly recommend that you buy the game - it's not exactly expensive in either the UK or the US. The only major flaw I discovered was the repetitiveness which reduced replay value a little. That being said, Stranglehold is still a lot of fun and the ludicrous action scenes do get the adrenaline pumping in places.