Stranglehold review for PS3

It's a month for surprises on the PS3, both good and bad. Stranglehold continues this run. With access to preview code not allowed by any games journalists, the rumour was that the money spent on Stranglehold had not born fruit, but with a review copy in our hands, or more importantly, in our PS3, the game has more than set us straight. Putting you, literally, into a John Woo film, Stranglehold is a stunning shooter that looks amazing and brings the best slo-mo gun fights ever to the screen. Read our Stranglehold for PlayStation 3 review now to find out what $30 million buys you in a game.

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Stranglehold review for PS3

It was always going to happen. Sooner or later, John Woo was going to wake up to the fact that every man and his dog had taken his classic mix of slow motion violence and wedged it into a video game. Max Payne is the closest reference point, with dual pistol air battles reminding everyone of films like Face Off and Woo's earlier hit Hard Boiled, which is what the Stranglehold universe is part of.

The man on a mission is Inspector Tequila who is essentially, to Woo's action movies, what Riggs is to Lethal Weapon. But there's no wisecracking comedy in Stranglehold. Straight from the amazing intro sequence in which Woo stape Chow Yun-Fat voices Inspector Tequila, there's a sequence in which the camera zooms in to a barrel of a gun and follows the bullet which travels into the chest of a fellow cop. It's brutal stuff, accompanied by Woo's visual trademarks such as flying doves, dramatic pistol standoffs and explosions which send bodies flying like projectiles escaping from a nail bomb. It's like the A-Team but with the kills seen in glorious close up, not hidden behind men jumping through the air, pretending to be suffering the strangely harmless effect of a hand grenade.