Just... don't... bother...

User Rating: 6 | Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza PC
This is the first time I have played a game tied so closely to a movie, and I am surprised they managed to pull it off. While some liberties have been taken with the storyline to flesh out the game and add some new locales to spice things up the story still hangs together fairly well. Scenes from the movie have been lifted straight into the game as cutscenes which advance the plot, which works ok most of time. There were some quirks like how the bearded Nakatomi employee Ellis turned into a moustached blonde or how Special Agent Johnson suddenly turned Caucasian.

The production values are so so. While the graphics are quite bland they still manage to present a convincing environment in a typical modern day office tower. The artists should be credited for having managed to recreate several of the locales featured in the Nakatomi Plaza in painstaking detail. The music though is forgettable and the weapons sound underwhelming (although they look really good), but on the other hand the ambience of humming generators, ventilation systems and computer halls is very good. Your footsteps make characteristic noise depending on if you walk on polished tiles or muffled carpets and so on. There is also a satisfying crash everytime you smash a glass panel.

The film featured twelve terrorists, you will have disposed of twice that number before the second level ends. They mainly stand around in corridors shooting in your general direction but will also give chase if you try to escape into another room. Sometimes the behaviour of opponents will be scripted, adding some variation to the fighting or making for interesting death scenes.

The flaws of the storytelling, the repetitiveness of the combat and the dated production values could have been forgiven if the gameplay was satisfying. This is were things fall apart. You spend almost all of the 30 levels being hearded through a maze of locked doors shooting at the same enemies with your inaccurate submachinegun again and again. There is no "feeling" to the shooting, you can only hope that your shots are going to find their target. Halfway through the game pretty much all the levels are recycled and there is very little incentive to continue playing.

To top it all off the game ends with an infuriatingly annoying boss fight that I only managed to sit through because I wanted to come to a closure, uninstall the game and move on with my life. That has now been completed.