Stranglehold Member Review for the Xbox360

The Good: High production values makes you feel like you're in a movie, superb voice acting, Tequila's moves are awesome, blood galore!

The Bad: Shorter than short, unbalanced difficulty makes things extremely frustrating at times, boring and uninspired story, gets derivative about half way through

Stranglehold has so much going for it but it falls flat on it's face due to the fact that it provides so little. You really feel like you're in a high budget action movie full of 100% destructible environments and tons of stylish moves. You can run up railings, slide down them, back flip off walls, do Max Payne/Matrix dives, slow down time. You have a few cool abilities such as a sniper shot where you can precisely shoot an area on the enemy and enjoy the awesome animations. You have a Barrage power where you are invincible, can shoot 10 times faster, and have infinite ammo for a few seconds, and a spin attack which kills everyone in the room. The graphics and audio is top notch and looks great and there isn't any slow down even with hundreds of things flying around the room.

There are a bunch of interesting unlockables in here as well. The story is somewhat interesting but is really confusing and feels incomplete. Tequila is trying to get his family back from two rivaling gangs known as the Russian I-9s and the Chinese Dragon Claws. It's short, confusing, and kind of boring really. While all this is good and all the game is extremely short where you can finish it in less than 10 hours, and the game gets really repetitive after about half way through. Sure there are turret sequences and all that but it doesn't mix things up enough. The game is a blast while it lasts and is good for a fun rental but nothing more.