A great concept that does justice to some of the best action movies ever made.

User Rating: 8 | Die Hard Trilogy PS
I've always loved the Die Hard movies (with the possible exception of 4.0...), having been a staple of my childhood - is there a man alive who doesn't love the first film? So I was naturally elated when this came out back in the early days of the PS1, and managed to both pay homage to the films and deliver a brilliant gameplay experiece.

~

Pros:

+ Variety: Each film in the trilogy gets its own kind of gameplay: over-the-shoulder action for the first, Virtua Cop-style shooting for the second, and a city-wide driving for the third. Incredibly, despite the wide variety of styles, the quality is compromised for none of them, resulting in a unique experiece that only modern GTA games really come close to.

+ Bloodlust: While the John McClane of the movies was a heroic chap who did his best to save civillians, this was clearly lost in translation somehow: from mercy-killing flaming hostages to mowing down pedestrians and wiping the blood away with your windscreen wipers, there was plenty of demented fun to be had for those less inclined to play nice!

+ Driving: All three of the game types are well-executed, but the driving section was particularly amazing for the time - this was one of the first PS1 games to simulate driving through a city in full 3D (Twisted Metal is perhaps the only game that might have done it before), and given that it did this at breakneck speed through a wide variety of levels and vehicles, it really was something special.

Cons:

- Bitty Experience: The actual plots of the movies and basically lost (with the arguable exception of the second film/game), so you're essentially playing a whole bunch of disconnected levels.

- Repetitive: The gameplay within each section doesn't vary a massive amount, and several level designs end up recurring in the first and third games.

- Longveity: Once you've finished it, there's not much reason to return given the lack of story/experience.

~

While it probably hasn't aged too gracefully, Die Hard Trilogy was great for its time, and is still highly amusing for the sheer anarchic destruction it incorporates - you can set pigeons on fire, for crying out loud! More importantly, perhaps, it was a great fusion of different gameplay styles, and I suspect it helped pave the way for the likes of GTA in this respect.