Game Reviews

Die Hard

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Die Hard
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Thematically, Die Hard - the game of the most recent Bruce Willis-fronted action movie A Good Day To Die Hard - has a lot in common with the original movie. It's about greed, violence, and one man facing apparently insurmountable odds.

The similarities end there, though, because this new digital take on Die Hard is a poorly put together endless-runner that, while showing some potential, is too often knee-capped by strange decisions and hilariously bad ideas.

Die young

You play as John McClane's son Jack, who's younger and leaner than his old man and likes nothing better than running along a set path shooting at identikit Russian goons and collecting spinning coins. You throw the crewcut badass around with a series of swipes and taps.

Swiping left or right changes the lane you're running in, swiping up jumps you over obstacles, swiping down reloads your weapon, and tapping on the screen in vaguely the right direction will fire a bullet into a balaclava-shod hooligan.

Hitting obstacles slows you down, but it doesn't kill you. It's all the bullets being fired in your general direction that do that. You have a life bar, but once that hits zero it's game over. Unless, of course, you spend some of the game's premium currency to keep barrelling on.

A dial in the top-right hand corner fills up as you play, and when it's full you can tap it to slow things down briefly with a sort of bullet-time effect, letting you pick off multiple bad guys quickly. It just about works, but it rarely feels necessary.

Under a vest

Often stumbling over blocks will actually save you from being shot, and the endlessly inept terrorists you're fighting are as likely to stand there and let you murder them as they are to fire their weapons.

This is a game that's as dumb as they come, with dialogue that sounds like it was recorded by someone doing a drunken impression of Alan Partridge doing a drunken impression of a Soviet-era Bond villain.

Some power-ups change you into a completely different character for a while, and hilariously overpowered special guns let you destroy entire chunks of scenery with a single tap. But - and this is a big but - for all of its dunderheaded buffoonery Die Hard still manages to entertain.

Like the stupid action movies it owes its name to, this is popcorn fodder of the very lowest order. If it were a burger it would be rammed full of horse meat, and every bite would send E numbers and god knows what else into your blood stream, but you'd still wolf it down with a braindead grin on your slavering chops.

Die Hard

It might be ugly, stupid, and often unintentionally hilarious, but Die Hard is fun enough that for whatever brief period of your life you waste on it you won't mind
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.