John Woo’s Stranglehold
After playing Bioshock I was in a demo playing mood. To be completely honest, I thought this game would be total garbage. Much to my surprise, its actually a lot of fun. I don’t think I’ve played a game where so much stuff can be blown up at the same time. In serious firefights, EVERYTHING is exploding into pieces around you.
Anyhow, the game is actually a pretty straightforward run-n-gun type of game, with the addition of some neat interactivity with the environments. For instance if you run into a table top or similar surface, your character (named Tequila), will do a butt slide sort of maneuver over it. It doesn’t look terribly realistic when there is no action going on, but when there are a ton of guys shooting at you, it feels and looks pretty cool.
A big part of the game is using a technique called “Tequila Time”, which is a slow motion matrix effect that basically allows you to shoot a whole bunch of people while looking cool. For instance of you dive for cover, Tequila Time will kick in and you can shoot at whoever is in front of you will you are in mid air. I’ve never played games like Max Payne or anything with this sort of bullet time effect, so its a first for me and I’m digging it.
You really need to play the demo at the hard difficulty of above. Anything below that is too easy, and you don’t really need to use the environment, special techniques, and Tequila Time effectively to get through the level.
There is actually a large amount of content in the demo. If you play the demo on Normal, you will get a new ability and will be able to play the game on Hard difficulty. Play through on Hard difficulty and you’ll get the spin attack move and the ability to try the Hard Boiled difficulty. By time you are done with the demo, you might have had enough of the game. I mean, at this point you’ve tried out all of the special abilities that Tequila has, and have also put a decent amount of time into playing the game.
I wonder if perhaps there is too much content in this demo. It kind of reminds me of the Crackdown demo, where by the end of the demo you have near maximum agility and maximum strength, and there really isn’t much left to experience in the actual game, except more things to shoot at.
Of course, much like Crackdown, I probably would have never played this game if a demo wasn’t available. And now that I have played it, its definitely a game I would consider buying.
At any rate, the demo is a lot of fun. I recommend giving it a try. Definitely play through it and try it out at the harder difficulties as well, it gets much more interesting with the added challenge.
-Aurash
