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Now you can play the movie! Except the movie is wonderful, and playing this game isn’t.
Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza is a phenomenally good idea — use the indoors-friendly LithTech engine to put you in the bare feet of John McClane for his heroic one-man stand against German terrorists. [Who said they were terrorists? — Ed.]
The game follows the narrative of the original Die Hard film very closely, which is both reassuring and weird. Watching stiff cinematics of the classic scenes and listening to awful voice actors re-create German accents is like watching a high-school play: you kind of admire the effort, but you can’t help but wince and wish they would stop. Tickets
Unfortunately, the FPS gameplay has problems of its own. While the graphics are very appealing, your progress is utterly railed, which sort of defeats the purpose of all the impressive architectural design. Enemy-AI tactics consist mostly of running right at you, with occasional breaks to roll around on the ground in a comical evasive maneuver. Baddies require many direct hits to finish them off, and since Hans evidently brought along around 1,000 guys for this caper, it can result in some frustrating meatgrinders, even on Normal difficulty.
Progress can also be bizarrely confusing. At the end of one early stage, I waxed the taunting Tony (“I promise I won’t hurt you”) and then spent 10 minutes wandering the empty level trying to figure out what to do next. Turns out I just had to activate Tony’s corpse to end the level. I got hung up on several such unclear snags.
But for all the tedium, there are still some fun bits. The invasion of SWAT teams late in the game — they shoot at you on sight, but if you hit them the game is over — adds some fun punch, as does the inevitably cool elevator-shaft and firehose-jump sequences.
McClane wannabes may find some joy in this $30 title, but “die hard” action fans are better off buying the DVD.