Die Hard Vendetta: The forgotten McClane.

It’s the holidays again – at least as of this writing – and naturally I thought about writing about a holiday themed game. Realizing that’s not a particularly big pool of games to choose from, I opted for games based on media franchises that took place during the holidays. Like Die Hard.

(I... sorta miss these? Companies publishing video game adaptations is something solely lacking these days.)

We could have the never-ending debate of whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but instead I’d rather talk about the strange resurgence of Die Hard video games throughout the late-90s to early-2000s. After the Lethal Weapon-like Die Hard With a Vengeance hit theaters, the fate of the franchise seemed to be in doubt, with whether or not a fourth film would even be made. During this time, 20th Century Fox decided to get into the video game business, forming the short-lived Fox Interactive, licensing some of their film franchises like Alien for video games, with varying levels of success.

(Footage from the action-packed Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza. Surprisingly alright, if a little clunky.)

Naturally Die Hard got a fair share of video games. There’s the popular and famous Die Hard Trilogy which did three different gameplay styles in a single game, unheard of around that time. There’s that time Sega made a game inspired by the film called Dynamite Deka that got localized as Die Hard Arcade when it hit the States. There’s even the Lithtech-powered Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza which was originally meant to be a mod until copyright lawyers came in, converting it became a full-fledged budget title. I wrote about that one back in 2015, of which you can read here.

But there was one more attempt at a big Die Hard game. But this time instead of adapting the original film, they wrote a story that could’ve been the plot for a fourth film. And it’s the kind of game that will make you wish blew up Die Hard like Nakatomi Plaza.

(Who's doing the vendetta in this case?)

Die Hard Vendetta is a first-person shooter developed by Bits Studios and published by Sierra and Fox Interactive, released in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube.  Die Hard Vendetta was a project that originally had its origins as a Nintendo 64 title, but was shifted over to the more powerful GameCube once the popularity of the N64 waned. There’s a lot of information on the Nintendo 64 iteration on Unseen64, of which it’s an interesting read. But for now we’ll cover the game that came out instead.

(Couldn't even try to make him look somewhat like Bruce Willis, huh?)

Taking place years after the events of Die Hard With a Vengeance, John McClane is a semi-retired NYPD police officer who moved to Los Ange- sorry, Century City, watching a news report of a piece of art being recovered by Piet Gruber, the son of Hans Gruber from the original film.

(Guess William Atherton was busy that day. Of all the people to bring back from the first film...)

Eventually a massive shootout happens, putting people at risk, including John’s daughter Lucy, who’s also a police officer. Caring for his family, he grabs his service revolver and heads down to the art gallery to find out what’s going on.

(I bet those destructible walls were considered pretty neat for 2002.)

Naturally, Die Hard Vendetta is a first-person shooter. Fairly straightforward for the time, the game adopts the same kind of control scheme seen in games like Goldeneye 007 and Timesplitters, with a free-floating crosshair that can be aimed anywhere on the screen. L button does more refined aiming, R button fires, Z button reloads. 

(Fumbling with an inventory system is not my idea of a good time, personally.)

Using the d-pad can switch between John’s arsenal and items he’s acquired throughout his journey. X and Y are your jump and crouch buttons, hitting X twice will do a dive to prone, which is required to progress in some areas.

(Cause breaking up the action with sequences where I have to talk to random NPCs to progress is a great way to pace the game.)

The A button is your catch-all use button: Interacting, picking up items, the works. You’ll need to use this button a lot, as a fair share of things are hidden behind lockers or require John to constantly talk to an NPC to get information on where to progress. Sometimes it’s helpful, but other times you’re just wasting time hearing about the story of what’s happening multiple times.

(What does this game think it is, Splinter Cell?)

In an interesting yet flawed mechanic, pressing the B button will switch between stealth and combat. In stealth mode, John moves slower and has his gun pointing upwards. Pressing it again puts him back in combat mode, where he’ll move and shoot incredibly quickly. If an enemy isn’t aware of you, you can interact with the A button to make him a human shield, letting enemy players surrender their weapons for a more non-lethal approach. 

The mechanic is interesting, but when the rest of the game up to this point has been a straightforward shooting gallery, it just feels forced in. There’s only a section or two that requires John to be sneaky, and I only had to use the human shield thing once to make progress in an early mission.

(Naturally if I got spotted or didn’t take the criminals guns while using one as a human shield, the mission would automatically fail. Not my idea of a fun time!)

Since this came out not long after Max Payne and The Matrix were popular, this game has its own version of bullet time. Pressing L and Y activates “Hero Time,” where Ode to Joy – ostensibly the theme to Die Hard at this point – plays as you move quickly and spew bullets at your enemies. I used this a handful of times, mostly to kill bosses and it felt kind of superfluous, especially with how this game plays.

(Turns out Ode to Joy doesn't quite work as bullet time music.)

Die Hard Vendetta was made around the time console first-person shooters were still experimenting with control schemes before it was standardized by Halo and Call of Duty in the latter half of the 2000s. Thus this uses a control scheme similar to GoldenEye 007 where there’s a floating crosshair around that you can move anywhere with the C-stick. To compensate for the floaty crosshair, Die Hard Vendetta has an auto-targeting option where the crosshair will go red and lock onto the target, which then makes it simple to murder terrorists with ease.

(Dang, even Goldeneye wasn't this generous.)

The downside is this makes a lot of the combat sections trivial, where you can just burst into an open area and just hold the R button, murdering everything without much of a challenge. I know Die Hard is an action-packed movie franchise, but this just dumbs down the game in a way that makes combat boring. Though considering how shooters were at the time, I’d rather have the generous auto-aim over trying to finesse the finer aiming on enemies. You can turn this off if you want, but why make the game harder on yourself?

(They even added a sewer section! Somebody get Civvie 11 on the line.)

In addition to the inventory system, McClane can put on disguises to get into areas. While an interesting idea, it doesn’t really fit in Die Hard, and feels like a clunky way to add variety to the gameplay. I only used it when the game required me to do so, such as in an early mission where I had to put on a gang uniform to get a stolen piece of art from a gang, who eventually get into a shootout with a rival gang.

(Guess he doesn't get much royalty checks from Family Matters reruns.)

The rest of the game is mostly uneventful. You meet Al Powell in the beginning – once again voiced by Reginald VelJohnson – and go through various areas in Century City as McClane tries to find the captured art dealer from Piet Gruber, as well as the paintings that have been stolen.

("Hey guys, can you think of a foreign-sounding last name?" "Uhhhh, Frontslovsky?")

Despite a Gruber being featured in this, he’s the secondary villain and henchman to the whole proceedings. The main villain featured is another new character named Jack Frontier, a former bodybuilder and actor who works with Gruber due to being snubbed as the star of Galaxy Thief III. Frontier, who looks like that Sarge character from Small Soldiers, is often seen in cutscenes, which is strange to make a callback by featuring a Gruber as a villain, yet also making a new villain. Were they undecided on which way to go and opted for both choices?

(Honestly? Die Hard Nakatomi Plaza looked better than this.)

The only other thing worth talking about is the next-to-final level, which of course, takes place on Nakatomi Plaza. I get why you put that in there, that’s basically the most well-known thing the franchise was known for.. But it really feels like a deliberate nod to elements of the film without really understanding what made the original film great. At least someone says “Yippie-Ki-Yay, motherfucker,” even if it’s not John who says it.

Though, that’s not the end of the game! Frontier escapes to the Griffith Observatory – renamed the Holmes Observatory in this game – with the intent of murdering his Galaxy Thief replacement, and has guarded the place full of enemies with powerful guns, a helicopter, rocket launcher turrets, the works. Naturally Frontier himself is the final boss, but just shooting him dead doesn’t end the game, as they require you to make a mad dash out of the observatory before it all blows up.

(Someone was inspired by the explosion in the original film if this shot is any indication.)

The Observatory explodes in spectacular fashion, John McClane survives, a hotshot movie executive wants to make the story into a movie (wink wink), then John punches them out like in the end of the original film. Roll credits. Since this doesn’t take place during Christmas, we don’t even get serenaded with Vaughn Monroe’s “Let It Snow” at the end.

(Did we really need this many enemies? Probably not.)

Bits Studios took Die Hard’s concept of “One man against insurmountable odds” too literally. The game is ridiculously punishing on “Die Harder” difficulty, which is the game’s Normal mode. There’s too many moments where I got an “Objective Failed” message because I forgot to activate or grab something, John McClane is apparently made of paper and wet cardboard, and the game tries to hamfist all these ideas that aren’t done very well or are only used once. For this game to frame itself as a sequel to the movies is kind of an insult, it comes off as one of those cheapo direct-to-video sequels made for a quick buck. All this leads to is a fairly mediocre game with little replay value once you beat it.

(I guess this looks nicer? Doesn't make the game any better.)

Unless you live in Europe. While Die Hard Vendetta was a GameCube exclusive in North America, the game was available on all platforms in PAL regions, with PS2 and Xbox versions coming out a year later. The game has a few cosmetic changes under the hood, but the campaign is about the same, with some tweaks to elements like the auto-aim being not as generous this time. 

(Seems that the Goldeneye influences were a bit more apparent in this version.)

The only major addition was a split-screen multiplayer mode for up to four players, something that was often done to games that eventually went multiplatform, like Medal of Honor: Frontline and James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire. Though if you had the choice of this or Halo: Combat Evolved on the Xbox, why would you choose this game except for a laugh? At least you can play the multiplayer with bots.

(Probably won't be that hard considering how easy it is for McClane to die in this game.)

At the time, critics were nonplussed by this addition to the franchise, with Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot giving it a rather scathing review at the time. I picked this up years ago when GameStop was slowly phasing out used GameCube games from their store, around the same time I got swindled into trying StoneLoops! of Jurassica through their short-lived Impulse digital distribution service. (I wrote about StoneLoops! way back in 2012, you can read about that here.)

(Guess McClane has a knack for that sort of thing.)

That’s all I have to say about Die Hard Vendetta. An unremarkable, mostly forgettable FPS that tried to keep the aging film franchise going for a little while longer. There wouldn’t be much in terms of Die Hard games after this, besides some mobile games and McClane being a playable character in Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War, complete with lines from the movie. The franchise has pretty much lied dormant after the critically panned A Good Day to Die Hard in 2013, and with Bruce Willis getting up there in years, I figure Die Hard as a franchise has truly died hard.

(Wouldn't be an FPS from the early 2000s without it featuring that clunky OICW assault rifle concept as a weapon.)

As for Bits Studios, they made a handful of games after this, including a game adaptation of the film Constantine before shutting their doors in the late 2000s. I can’t say they were a bad studio, but Die Hard Vendetta feels like a game being made by multiple developers with different ideas on where to take the franchise, with all of them boiling it down to how the later Die Hard films feel like: Schlocky action flicks involving an aging Bruce Willis who clearly is doing this for a paycheck rather than a love for the series.

I know they probably won’t make another Die Hard game any time soon, but I think it would be interesting to give it one more try if they made it more like Alien: Isolation, where it’s a stealth game with optional combat sections. I would play something like that. When you think about it, that’s basically how the Die Hard franchise was, not the action-packed shooty fest some of these games depicted it as. Though, Die Hard could also just stay dead. Not everything needs to be brought back, after all.

If this is like Die Hard video games are like, I can’t imagine other Christmas film-themed games being any better. At least Lethal Weapon didn’t get a buddy cop FPS tie-in in the 2000s...