Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza (2002 Video Game) User Reviews

Puts you right in the movie

[CuriosityKilledShawn · 7/10 · 7 May 2004]

There's a lot to like and a lot to dislike in this game. First of all it sticks very closely to the way Nakatomi Plaza looks and sounds so you feel like you really are there. The music is a lot like that in the movie and adds atmosphere. But there are only like 2 tracks! The blood splatter effects are quite cool but shooting a bad guy is the only way to kill him. In this sense the game is VERY linear. There is absolutely no freedom. You HAVE to do what the game wants you to do. Which is really stupid considering the effort that has obviously went into crafting each and every floor of Nakatomi Plaza.

There are a lot more than just 12 terrorists here. Obviously the game has to be beefed up to about 300 to make it more exciting and a few new scenarios are added (And some stuff, like the media attention of the siege, totally ignored). It was also very annoying to see the FBI Chopper STILL flying around after the roof has blown up. I guess this was just a cheap way to avoid a cinematic.

The voice acting is also rather poor. It makes the cinematics hard to watch sometimes. And what's the point of having a CB radio (a cunning excuse to plug a certain product) when it is only used during cinematics and NEVER when you want.

In the ancient Die Hard Trilogy you got lots of weapons. But in this all you get is the ordinary gun, some flash grenades and 4 machine guns. The best of which are sparsely featured in the later levels. You can't even get into fist fights. So the fight with Karl is non-existent. All you do is shoot him. Wow!

And chances for really cool stuff have been ignored. How cool would it be to chuck bad guys thru the windows or off the roof or down the lift shafts? Doesn't happen. Even you jump off the roof yourself it just cuts to 'game over'.

But the worst thing is the ending. It's nothing like the movie, boring and dull. It takes a lot of patience to get thru and then...nothing happens. A cheap, tiny cinematic follows and the game returns to the title screen. Come on! That's it?

By only if you are a fan of the movie. For the casual gamer this is dated stuff.

Lackluster at best, but not a total failure.

[OneLeggedHippy · 12 December 2006]

Having bought Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza for just $4.99 at Big Lots, I had about zero faith in this game being good at all. Shockingly though, Nakatomi Plaza only mildly blows. It's merely just an average, plain, generic shooter with some pretty noticeable flaws.

I'd first like to point out that the game's cutscenes are downright nauseating and laughable. I don't know if it's the lack of animation, absurd looking characters, or horrible voice acting. I don't see how anyone could make a cutscene so awful.

Take for instance, the scene in Die Hard (the movie) where the FBI is being introduced. There are two agents named Johnson, one's white and one's black. The line from the movie was, "I'm Agent Johnson, this is Special Agent Johnson. No relation.", which was pretty funny. In the game they recreate this scene, except, BOTH AGENTS ARE FREAKIN' WHITE!! It kills the joke and doesn't even make any friggin' sense! The developers were either lazy, or just plain stupid or something. They pretty much take every single great scene from the movie, remove the awesomeness, and then rework it into graphical form. It's almost like a bunch of high school kids got a camera and decided to remake the movie. The voice acting doesn't help either. All the voice actors sound wooden and painfully bad, especially the main villain who sounds absolutely terrible. The only actor they could get from the movie was Reginald VelJohnson, which I guess does a semi decent job with the material he was given.

The only semi redeeming thing about this game is thankfully also the most important part, the gameplay. As bland as the graphics, sound, and pretty much everything else is, the game is actually pretty fun to play through once. Since instead of 12 terrorists, there are like 12,000, you will always have a horde of bad guys to mow down with your machine gun, which is always fun. It is a little awkward though having the gun be on the left side of the screen. Since Bruce Willis is left handed, I guess they were going for some realism there. Which is rather questionable in my opinion, since he's not in the game. If your going to have his face blacked out on the cover, and his voice done by someone else, then who the hell is going to care if he is using the wrong hand? I don't know maybe that's just me. They should have at least had an option to switch hands or something. It's a minor complaint really.

And like another person commented on here, the game suffers from some really brutal product placement. I quote the actual box to the game: "Use a Zippo lighter to light you way through the darkened floors and vents, a Motorola two-way radio to contact the outside world..." The product placement is so amazingly forced and obvious that it's laughable.

So to wrap this up, this game is so old and generic that your probably not going to even find it in stores anyway. It's fun for one time through. It will take you about 3 or 4 hours to beat it, then you will uninstall it and never touch it again. There's no multiplayer or any unlockable stuff to hold your interest. For $5, I'd say it was money decently spent. If you spend anything above that though you shall be throughly disappointed. Yippee Kai yey...

System Requirements: Windows, Pentium II 400, 64MB RAM, 800MB HDD, 3D Accelerator, 4X CD-ROM

Great game that puts you into the extreme action of the original Die Hard movie!

[MovieAddict2016 · 5 July 2002]

Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza, not only puts you into the action of the hit 1988 movie, but also into a first person view of John McClane. This game is practically the movie, except you get to do everything, and experience everything first hand. With Great cut scenes, taken right from the movie, pretty good graphics for a pc game, and even the voice of Reginald Vel Johnson himself(Sgt. Al Powell, from the Die Hard movie)this game is definately worth the 30 bucks I payed for it. It has everything from the movie, even things like the barefoot glass scene(which if you don't get to a med kit fast enough in the game, you will bleed to death)and hanging from the Nakatomi Plaza from a firehose and shooting a window out and jumping through the window, I never knew this game would be so faithful to the movie. It might be weird that they're releasing this game 15 years after die hard the movie was released, but it catches something the other die hard games didn't(not to mention the others were to much of an arcade game). This game is no let down at all, and I give it 4/5 stars. Yippee Cay Yah!