DIE HARD

DIE HARD




The Die Hard movies, highly regarded as one of the best action movie franchises ever have found their way to mobile. It’s a good idea in theory; play as hero cop John McClane and terminate the terrorists, and rescue the hostages. The repetition quickly sets in though, as collecting keys and defusing bombs isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Players walk around various levels of the ‘Tech Corp’ building, shooting bad guy after bad guy and collecting key cards to open doors. On each level the lift is broken, and the lift isn’t fixed until you defuse all the bombs (by solving a simple puzzle) and the hostages have been rescued. Instead of the action game it was intended as, the game quickly becomes an adventure akin to ‘Where’s Wally?’ For the uninitiated, the ‘Where’s Wally’ series is a series of books where readers search the page for Wally. This is basically the same experience felt in Die Hard, with players searching cabinet after cabinet, toilet after toilet, for keycards and bombs (by pressing the # button for 5 seconds at a time). Admittedly, there are people that may enjoy repeatedly searching for things, but these are not the same people that buy a game called ‘Die Hard’, based on gritty action movies. You can tell the developers can sense this too, when they chuck in a meaningless time-trial level to save 10 hostages in 5 minutes. Shooting terrorists provides slightly more entertainment than tiresome searching but is ruined by the fact that you can’t even reach them until you unlock the darn door.

The graphics, thankfully, are done nicely and are good enough to save the game from being a total waste of time. Die Hard’s no ‘Super Real Tennis’ or ‘Splinter Cell 3D’, but it does quite a good job as an isometric game, carefully detailed and well shadowed. It could’ve used some extra spark, those greys in the floor, clothes and walls get awfully dreary after, uh, the first 7 levels or so. It doesn’t help that the floors all look pretty much identical. The sound also tries, but offers nothing more than the although realistic, routine sounds of guns being fired and doors sliding open.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. From the start screen to my first couple of bullets fired as hero John McClane I was impressed, but from then on the true mediocrity of the game settled in. The reason Die Hard has failed is because it’s tried to be too many things at once. An action/adventure/puzzler has rarely worked before, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon. If Dynamite Mobile had maybe concentrated on making a good shoot ‘em up, or even a good puzzler, they would’ve had a greater chance of success. The game is polished, sure, but that’s not what makes a good game.

enjoy!!