What the hell is going on? Everyone seems to be gushing over videogames these days. Look at the scores Heavenly Sword managed to get. Nines! Ninetysomethings! "It’s the PS3’s killer app!" And look at Halo 3 for crying out loud, it’s scoring incredibly highly right up there in the nineties. Nobody has anything bad to say about it and it’s being heralded as the greatest videogame ever. That’s not just by some fanboy on a message board, either, but by the specialist and mainstream press! The highest score Stranglehold has got is also in the nineties, or ‘nine out of ten’ if you prefer. Stranglehold is as good as "greatest game ever" and "the PlayStation 3’s killer app". Seriously, what the hell is going on?

Now we’ve all played Max Payne – well, Stranglehold is Max Payne covered in John Woo goo. If you haven’t played Max Payne, despite our sweeping statement in the previous sentence, then look at the screens, imagine a girning man in a trench coat instead of Chow Yun Fat and you’re there. They’ve both got the same ‘diving about in slow motion’ thing going on, and in an Alanis Morrissette type of irony Max Payne was meant to emulate the ‘bullets and ballet’ action of John Woo’s early films. Yet here is a game based on John Woo’s early films using the same mechanic as Max Payne! Ho, ho, ho!

Only, Stranglehold has combos – combos mean points, and points make thrills. No, not really, and gunning down hundreds of enemies doesn’t either, it just starts to feel like Dynasty Warriors with bullets after a while.

Each level plays out in a similar way – you shoot everyone until they stop coming. Sometimes when you think you’re down, more people come. Eventually, though, they do stop and you can move on to the next section to make people stop coming there too. There are various ways to do this, which is where all the leaping about begins.

Pressing L2 makes Fat dive. Most of the time anyway; occasionally you press it and he does nothing and that really messes with what you were planning. When you do pull a dive off correctly while there’s an enemy in sight then it’s Tequila Time. Everything slows down and turns brown, letting you shoot people in the head as you slowly fall to the ground. This is the bit that’s exactly like Max Payne, except its developer had the decency not to turn everything brown.

But Fat can do more than just dive. He has got expert balance, which means he can run up banisters and slide down them too. Get far enough and you can make him run up and down a dinosaur skeleton. Again, any enemies in your sight will activate the Tequila Time and let you pop off a few shots while you watch their bullets whiz past. You get style points killing people while you’re pulling off a trick too, so it’s better to shoot people from the skull of a dinosaur, or as you’re rolling along on a trolley, or doing a nifty wall jump. Comboing them together means a higher score, so as you rack up the kills, you rack up the points. It’s odd, though, because if you kill a wave of baddies, you then have to wait around for the next lot. Your combo meter quickly depletes while you’re doing this, which means you’ll have to start it up all over again.

The trouble is, this gets repetitive very quickly. You leap from one headshot to another trying to get your sight in the general direction of the enemies spawning randomly from whatever door they like in a level. It’s tricky to tell where their bullets are coming from and if you don’t keep leaping about and slowing time down then you’ll get shot to ribbons. The Tequila Bombs aren’t a great help either and you’ll find yourself just using the health boost rather than the Spin Attack which, while it kills everyone on screen (we got six at most), drains your Bomb meter. This then leaves you without enough to replenish the health, so you instantly lose when more enemies spawn behind you.

You could try to run away and position yourself better, but Fat is pretty slow, so don’t think you can rely on the ‘running up the banister’ trick. The banisters are bugged to buggery. They light up when you can jump on them, but you have to be in the right place. The ‘right place’ isn’t a sensible place like up close to them, instead it’s more like a few steps back and slightly off to the right. It makes no sense and sees you getting killed as you try to find the correct position.

So how is this frankly mediocre shoot-’em-up achieving such high scores and gushing praise? We’re not too sure. This could be some sort of paranoid delusion, but is the mainstream idea of videogames entering the specialist press? Is that what’s going on?

Tim Empey