Die Hard Vendetta

I may not be the biggest fan of the First Person Shooter genre. However, I can appreciate a good game when I see it–no matter what genre of gaming it is in. So when I saw that Sierra, the studio that put Valve in charge of the incredible Half-Life series was getting a new First Person Shooter together based in a post Die Hard 3 world, I was excited. But instead of screaming ‘Yippie-kai-yay’ while playing through Die Hard Vendetta, I threw my controller down in disgust.

You control John McClane as an older, grey-haired man. His daughter, Lucy, is on the Century City police force. On a day where Peit Gruber, the son of Die Hard’s villain, Hans Gruber, is debuting a new painting, Lucy is kidnapped and all heck breaks loose. This is all being shown on TV and McClane is watching from home. He immediately rushes to the scene of the crime to try and straighten things out.

The first thing you will notice is that Vendetta tells the story in two different ways. The first is through cinematic scenes. These appear to use the game’s engine to tell the story. However, when being played, they are very ‘grainy.’ The other way the story can be played out, which is also the primary way, is through conversation with NPC’s. This is very similar to what Half-Life did to genre. However, in Vendetta, the voice acting is pretty bad. This is especially true with McClain–who doesn’t sound a thing like Bruce Willis. Also, I should point out that there is quite a bit of language in Die Hard Vendetta. This is quite surprising since this is a GameCube game… Because of this, I would definitely not recommend kids playing this title.

Controlling McCain is very frustrating. It is very difficult to aim very precisely. To help with this, there is a great auto-aim feature. Just got the cursor near the target and they will be hit. This also causes a problem. In many of the hostage scenes, you just get the cursor near the enemy and you can kill them like a super cop. But if you try to take the auto-aim off, you can forget about ever hitting an enemy because the aiming is so difficult.

Graphically, the game is subpar. The framerate is low, the environments are boring, and the characters are not very detailed. The AI is also pretty stupid. When opening a door and poking your head through, enemies will begin to fire. If you close the door, they keep shooting and do not bother to come after you. So all you have to do is open the door again, race after them in-between their shots, and use the auto-aim to kill each and every one of them. No matter what weapon you use, you will be super accurate.

The only reason why Die Hard Vendetta is not getting a lower score is because it does a few things right. One of these features is the ability to use an enemy as a shield–similar to what happens in Dead to Rights. However, this has not been seen before in a FPS that I have played. However, this is a very pathetic attempt at creating a game based on one of my favorite movie franchises. Do yourself a favor and avoid this title.