Stranglehold Boss Fight

Now with colorful toxins! Worth: $10
based on 360 retail

Here's Gypsy 6 running to catch a taxi.

First time I've ever seen this: a breakable level.

I'm fighting a boss named Vlad. He runs up some stairs, I follow. I take out his henchmen and shoot the boss a little. Vlad runs away, down a different flight of stairs. I follow, shooting more henchmen. Vlad dashes across an open area. I'm about to follow when he turns on a massive grid of laser beams, tied into land-mine booby traps. One touch on the beams and I'm dead. So rather than try to fight while I sneak through the beams, I go back upstairs and engage Vlad (and more henchmen) from above. This makes him run away out of my sight, triggering another set of laser beams. I go back downstairs and sneak through the first set of beams, but get to a dead end. There's a barrier of beams between me and the next room where Vlad is. I look, and look. I go upstairs to reconnoiter. I sneak over here, nope. Sneak over there, nope not here either. I try shooting stuff (this game has a lot of environmental destruction). Lots of sparks and busted furniture now, but still no way forward. Maybe if I sneak up close to the beams and DIVE THROUGH ---

BOOM!

I'm fighting a boss named Vlad. He runs up some stairs, I follow...

I repeat the above cycle so many times that the game asks me if I'd like to try it on Easy difficulty level (I was on Normal). By this point I'm so pissed off I said, "Sure, I have no shame anymore, I'm clearly incapable of playing this fucking game!" Repeat, repeat, repeat. Look it up on Google. Sit through FIVE video walkthroughs. Repeat repeat repeat. WTF !?!!! Finally I'm so pissed I decide I might as well have some fun and just sprint after the boss, not stopping for anything.

90 seconds later I'm done.

If you make the boss advance, he activates the next stage of laser beams, which include some beams BEHIND YOU to keep you from backtracking. But I was getting him to advance without being anywhere near him, so the pattern would lock me out by activating those anti-backtracking beams IN FRONT OF ME, effectively breaking the level. The pattern doesn't try to detect where the player is, only the boss. The assumption is that if the boss is at point D, the player must be at point C. Meanwhile, I'm still all the hell way back at point A. This is clearly a huge oversight from lack of testing. There's no way I'm the only person to ever do this, and I did it fifteen times in a row!

Stranglehold is ok, but it's not good. I'm glad I waited so long to get it. While the frenzied bullet-fests are fun, that's literally all this game is. So far, the whole experience is like the Library level in Halo 1 with an occasional dose of the (shudder) mine level in Psi-Ops. Plus, the boss fights are weird. There's always some unnatural thing you have to do (like charge after the boss so he doesn't break the level). If it weren't Chow-Yun Fat and John Woo, I wouldn't have bothered to get past the second chapter. But, I love the movie Hard Boiled, and this game recreates the action scenes really well. Sadly, that's all I see coming from this one-dimensional serving of chocolate-frosted sugar bombs.