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Die Hard: VendettaBy Adrian Santiago - 03-13-03 Print  EmailYou are John McClane... battle hardened street cop and action superstar! Vivendi Universal does an average job of bringing all the action home in this FPS for the Nintendo Gamecube. The game plays much as you would expect. Run through the levels, kill off all the bad guys, move to next level. The game emphasizes the heavy action over the stealth aspect, but the stealth is an option that may open up more areas of the game for you. Don't let that fool you into believing that the game is wide open... or that the game is particularly deep. Hit and miss. Die Hard Vendetta appears to be running off of the highly over rated "Half-Life" game engine, and as a result we're treated to many exaggerated depictions of reality. Unchanging faces, big flopping lower jaws when someone speaks to you, and some relatively low-polygon models for some of the objects in the game. Die Hard Vendetta curiously features a mix of low and medium resolution textures... ranging from the excellently detailed guns in your HUD to the doors that are composed of six shades of grey and a flat doorknob. I kid you not when I say that some of the textures in Die Hard Vendetta remind me of "Wolfenstein 3d" in blockiness and simplicity. Explosions look nice, nothing too spectacular either. Objects in the real world (cars, tables and the like) look like they were pulled from a Nintendo 64 FPS. Sometimes the game will have excellent distortion effects (like looking through swirled glass windows), but otherwise the graphics are very much in the middle or worse. Speaking of the N64, almost any game on it that featured some kind of transparent sprites on screen slowed down the N64 noticeably. Why in God's name is the Gamecube slowing down for the same tasks? The programmers are to blame here, and it's really hard to think about how they screwed that up. As usual, the bad games have great sound. Gunfire, shouting, explosions, this game has them all nice, clear, and loud. The game has tons of spoken dialogue, some you'll never hear (because you don't care to speak to everyone), and some that are kind of forced on you. One reason I liked this game was because not a single word was edited in any way. Get ready kids... this game drops that F-Bomb left and right. None. There are no video clips of the Die Hard movies, and there is no multiplayer. To me, that is particularly stunning because many FPS come with even a stripped down deathmatch mode. If you play this game through once, you've pretty much got everything you can out of this title. Die Hard Vendetta. It certainly wasn't what I would have hoped for. It had all the features/gameplay elements that would have and should have made it great, but for whatever reason the developers really dropped the ball on this one. Ratings |
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