To break up the action here and there Stranglehold makes use of standoffs in preset locations in levels which start off with Tequila getting suddenly surrounded with enemies. In this mode the left stick makes Tequila lean and the right stick moves an on-screen reticle as you dodge enemy bullets in slow-motion and dish out hot lead. The camera moves from one enemy to another, and at the end of the standoff if you have not killed all of the enemies you must then deal with them using the normal gameplay means.

At the end of every level Tequila will have to face off with a boss encounter, which honestly seem a bit out of place in the gameplay. While the game rewards the player for stylishly fighting the hordes of mooks beforehand it does not when fighting the bosses. Since every boss fight is a straightforward matter of shooting them with a metric ton of bullets to kill them the game does little to encourage doing anything other than simply taking cover behind a wall or pillar and just spraying them with lead until they drop. Some boss encounters are a lot of fun and mix things up through either generous utilization of the game's destructible environments or actually diving around like Tequila does, but the other half are a hair's breadth from being boring and anti-climactic despite their difficulty.

If there is one area that Stranglehold excels in it is not only of how good the visuals look but also of how well they are presented. Chow Yun-Fat's likeness is perfectly recreated in the game and the facial animation and animation in general for all of the characters is surprisingly well done. The environments are richly detailed and lit with great use of lighting, but the star of the graphics show comes with the level of destruction and carnage that the game is capable of. While the ground and some of the level geometry isn't destructible nearly everything else in a level is, which includes everything from walls to archways, dinosaur skeletons and statues to at times entire buildings. When objects are broken it is almost always alongside a slew of special effects whether it be particle effects of debris from shattering stone and glass to a ton of golden coins and sparks flying out of a recently blasted slot machine. Enemies enter a ragdoll state when killed and if they happen to fall into a breakable object such as a table they will slam through it as they fall. Often at the end of combat you can just look around and marvel at exactly how much carnage the immediate area has undergone after looking so comparatively tidy just moments prior.

The voice-overs are well delivered and Chow Yun-Fat himself voices all of Tequila's dialog, but at times due to either the crazy amount of gunfire or the accents of the voice actors the lack of an ability to turn on any subtitles mars the experience somewhat. The sound effects however easily steal the show; pairing sound effects that sound quite distinct with some fairly top notch mixing to make the entire audio palette seem just as crisp as any blockbusting movie experience.

Stranglehold does feature a multiplayer component that features the same use of slow-motion and Tequila Bombs of the single-player. Every time you get a kill you gain both a small amount added to your Tequila Bomb meter and a fraction of the slow-motion bar fills up, which is the only way to fill it as it does not slowly grow over time. The slow-motion can be toggled on only when you completely fill the bar, which gives you a competitive edge over everyone else in the level.

For all of the fun it can bring though the multiplayer mode does have its downsides. It can be very difficult to find a match or even enter one without receiving an error. Even once inside of a match the gameplay is often laggy enough to the point that trying to hit your enemy results in both parties just spraying the area with a machine gun and hoping some shots land. A patch is rumored to be in the works, but as it stands the multiplayer is nowhere near the shape it should be in to be recommendable as a point of purchase.

Stranglehold's campaign mode is a little less than the average length weighing in at about six hours, but the flexible and energetic gameplay more than makes up for that small shortcoming. The action-centric gameplay is as intense, over the top, and engaging as any John Woo work should be, and combined with the visuals of the Unreal 3 engine the game is essentially a next-gen Max Payne.

Despite that oft-used comparison Stranglehold stands on its own feet as a top-billing action title worthy of the big names behind it and more than a passing glance from gamers yearning to dive onto a rolling cart in slow-motion glory and blast someone between the eyes through a wooden table.