In a lot of ways, action movies and first person shooter games have got a lot in common: there's plenty of them around, most are enjoyable but totally forgettable, and only a select few are memorable enough to stand the test of time. In the case of Die Hard, what you have is a series of brilliant action films that still look great today, and a franchise of video games ranging from mediocre to downright awful. Disappointingly, Die Hard: Vendetta does nothing to buck this trend, falling flat into the forgettable department.

The action takes place an indeterminate amount of time after the movie trilogy, where John is old and grey and his daughter Lucy is all grown up and following in her old man's footsteps as a police officer. Fans of the film will no doubt scratch their heads even at this early point, as his daughter was only five or six years old in the first film, which puts McClane's age in the geriatric action star category of somewhere around 50-55. Nevertheless, as the story unfolds a new Gruber appears on the scene with a nefarious plan, and through a chain of tenuous circumstances, it's up to John to uncover the plot and put a stop to this family of Germanic madmen once and for all.

Vendetta plays like any ordinary first person shooter, and suffers from the same problems that other generic offerings do: sluggish movement, questionable A.I. and hopeless controls. By default the game uses an auto-aim system, which reduces the game to an almost non-existent challenge of simply pointing McClane in the direction of an enemy and pulling the trigger. Playing the game without the auto-aim is even worse though, and the sloppy controls make any kind of decent accuracy impossible, even using the left-trigger zoom aim. But in the end you won't care much, as spray'n'pray works well enough, and all the enemies seem to use the same injury/death animations. The usual difficulty levels are included, and the single-player game will take around 20-25 hours to beat. Progress can be slow going, as level checkpoints can take quite awhile to reach, and the game can only be saved at these locations. In a frustrating twist, the checkpoints don't actually save, so if you turn off your Xbox you will have to play through the entire mission again.

While Die Hard Vendetta does nothing to raise the bar, it does incorporate a few interesting features to keep you from falling asleep. Stealth mode is reasonably well implemented, and allows you to walk up behind guards and use them as a body shield. Grabbing the leader of a group allows you to order him to make his henchmen drop their weapons, which adds an element of strategy to the proceedings. Likewise, there is a variety of ways to achieve many of the level objectives, such as disguising yourself as a homeless tramp to get past armed guards. The nowadays almost obligatory 'bullet-time' rip-off puts in an appearance too, with the cheesy name of 'Hero Time.' Despite the lame name, it is crucial for rescuing hostages and accomplishing some goals within the game.

Without a doubt the worst aspect of Die Hard Vendetta are the graphics, and is one of the most hit and miss visual productions that springs to mind. Texture detail is for the most part great, but the levels and environment items are angular and blocky and of a low polygon count. The textures on characters appear soft and blurry, while the environments are sharp and harshly defined. The small amounts of water you encounter in the game are pixel shaded and look terrific, but conversely the fire effects are 2D sprites which seem to have been ripped directly from a ten year old PC shooter like Blake Stone. It's truly amazing that some of the effects can be so impressive that you'll stop just to drink them in, while others can be so hideously dated. Vendetta is plagued by a problem I had hoped we had beaten, namely poor level design that allows you to get stuck in between walls and objects, unable to do anything but reset. In addition to the game breaking kind of catches, you will often get hooked on an invisible line if you walk too close to certain items, and have your bullets blocked by an unseen obstruction.

Included with the Xbox version of Die Hard Vendetta is a behind-the-scenes bonus, which contains featurettes on different aspects of the game. They're pretty short, but are quite interesting for those who'd like to learn a bit more about how a game evolves. Watching the section on character design, you will see the designers went to great lengths to make the characters look good, and to be fair up close they do. It seems, however, that somewhere along the way they forgot that the environments need to look decent too. The result being an often unpleasant contrast of high quality models set against ugly backdrops. On the plus side, the frame-rate is fairly consistent on the Xbox, and only during a few larger fire fights does Vendetta experience any drop in performance. The in-game cutscenes are a different story though, and they often jerk and stutter along in an almost embarrassing display of how not to tell the story in-game.

The one area where Die Hard Vendetta truly does shine is the audio. The voice actors are excellent, and add so much to the game that it is worth playing through just to hear McClane's quips and conversations with characters in the game. Rather than just recycling sound bites, it feels as though each character is a unique personality, even the generic baddies and hostages sound different, which is a credit to the vocal talent. Likewise the music is of an impressive standard, filled with great orchestral tunes that play on particular themes in the game, yet vary enough to not be annoying. My favourite aspect is the operatic rendition of Ode to Joy that plays whenever you enter Hero Time, which managed to bring a smile to my face every single time.

One of the new features added to the Xbox incarnation of Vendetta was the inclusion of a multiplayer component, something which was absent on other platforms. While credit is due to the developers for listening to fan feedback regarding a multiplayer mode, it feels extremely rushed and is genuinely not much fun to play. Many of the multiplayer levels are just single-player maps blocked off into deathmatch arenas, and it doesn't feel like much thought went into the maps at all. In fact, it seems like most of the complaints with the single player game are exacerbated in multiplayer; poor AI in the bots, unresponsive controls, and messy level design for you to get stuck on. Ultimately, playing a multiplayer game is frustrating and not at all enjoyable, leaving you with a bitter taste in your mouth and a desire to never play it again.