Midway have finally revealed Stranglehold's release date for both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game.  The Xbox 360 version will release September 5th and the PlayStation 3 version will hit stores September 17th. Midway has yet to provide the release date for the PC version.

Stranglehold is being developed by Midway in collaboration with legendary action film director John Woo, and  the game is billed as the spiritual sequel to director his 1992 film 'Hard Boiled'. The game stars Chow Yun Fat in a reprisal of his role as Inspector "Tequila" Yuen and is  is the first project  that Woo and Chow have collaborated since Hard-Boiled.

The plot takes place in latter-day Hong Kong, where a policeman has gone missing. No one knows what's happened until they receive a ransom call from an unnamed source. The crime boss kidnapper requests that a single officer appear in Kowloon market. Naturally, Tequila volunteers for the assignment, and so embarks on the beginning a sequence of battles with rival Triads and the Russian Mafia that extends from the street markets of Hong Kong all the way to the museums of Chicago.

Stranglehold will feature destructible environments, a slow motion system called 'Tequila time' and a vast array of weapons including the game's ubiquitous Beretta 92 pistols, a shotgun, a M4 Carbine, and a LMG. The environment will be almost completely destructible, stone blocks, walls, and objects have been shown shattering under fire in gameplay videos. The character can shoot at adversaries while diving, rolling, and swinging from level objects, and Tequila will also slide across tables and other surfaces, if he runs into them, instead of stopping.

'Tequila Time' is a slow-motion system similar to that used in games such as Max Payne. There are also four 'Tequila Bomb' modes which are activated by Stylish Kills, killing enemies either in Tequila Time or using the environment, or capturing glowing purple origami cranes. The four modes are Heal, Precision Shot (shoot at body parts - including the head, throat, limbs and groin), Barrage (Tequila becomes invulnerable with infinite ammunition for a short period of time), and Spin (Tequila automatically spins and shoots every enemy in the area).

Stay tuned to PSU for our review on Strangehold in the coming month.