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
