Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza

The Good
As a fan of the great "Die Hard" movies, I always wanted to play through the first movies suspenseful plot - but unfortunately, the games which were released were absolute crap. So I was very happy to see that they didn't repeat the mistakes they made in the past.

Okay, basically, it's just another Half-Life clone. You slaughter your way through 30 levels, shooting bad guy after bad guy, solving childish "puzzles" like "get key for that door" - and then, it's something else. It's like an interactive movie, but other than the rubbish which I played when the "interactive movie" hype was in full effect, the plot is simply great and the conversion from movie to game is breathtaking. Instead of using lame video sequences, they just took scenes from the movie and modelled them in 3D engine graphics, complete with every single detail! They took the movie script and used it for the dialogue and the speech is pretty similar to the original actors. Everything is very detailed, the character faces are very lifelike.

Ok, the story is already known by anyone who knows the movie, but it's a good plot with many funny and even more really suspenseful parts. It's more like being in the movie yourself, having to remember "what the hell, how did John McClane do this or do that". It's fun to recognize the different enemies (there are more enemies than in the movie, tons of them to be exact, but the "master villains" are the few dudes from the flick, and you WILL recognize those faces!).

The controls are the usual Quake type - there is no alternate fire, and only two weapon slots, but well, after all, even in the movie, John is no Ubermensch but a very brave cop with a headache.

The Bad
Well, it's pretty hard - you don't "die hard", but "die quick", even at medium difficulty. The bad guys - even at the first levels - seem to take much more bullets from the same gun than youself.

There is no multi player - which didn't hurt me since there are plenty of other games to choose from, but it's not very state of the art to omit that.

The Bottom Line
One of the best ego shooter games I ever saw - Max Payne was great for his setting of a gruesome, dark world where your only choices are desperation or death, but it was ways too short. This one is different as the story is already known, but this game lives from that point - because the player wants to be part of the movie. A must-buy for any serious action gamer!