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THE FIRST DIE HARD movie is one of those bona fide '80s action movie classics. It's the movie that managed to boost the unlikely Bruce Willis, until then known only for his roles in the TV series Moonlighting, the 'romantic comedy' Blind Date, and a dodgy eighties pop record which thankfully no-one talks about anymore, into the same action-hero category as Sly and Arnie.

And why? Because it's a great movie. And it's got all the classic ingredients of a first-person shooter: a lone hero, a 40-floor high-rise, guns, bombs, terrorists and innocent hostages. It oughta make a great game. Well, a new studio based in Vancouver, Canada and calling itself Piranha reckons so.

Apparently, the team behind Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza started working on it as a mod for Half-Life. They ran into licensing issues with the source material, but luckily Fox Interactive came to the party. The game will now be developed by Piranha and published by Sierra.

The great thing about the official licence, for Die Hard fans, is that the game will be able to stick very closely to the movie. In fact, Piranha says it is aiming to recreate the plot of the movie, with you as the player performing all the tasks and feats that John McClane (Bruce Willis) carries out in the film.

If this sounds overly scripted to you, Pirhana promises it won't feel that way. They figure that, during the course of the movie, you only get to see part of what McClane was doing. They aim to fill in the gaps with original action, spanning 38 single-player levels, as you run and gun between scripted sequences from the film. Not that there's anything wrong with a strong storyline anyway, as any fan of Half-Life or Undying will confirm. The key here is going to be the game play.

We are pleased to be able to report, based on the playable demo, the gameplay looks like it will be pretty good.

Apart from getting major publisher backing, the deal with Fox and Sierra has seen Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza move from the aging Quake 2/Half-Life engine to the LithTech engine used in the excellent No-One Lives Forever (another Fox Interactive production). While the LithTech engine is not quite cutting edge, next to Half-Life it's still a great looking engine. LithTech gives good crisp textures, it's very strong in character animations and provides good interactivity with the enviornments, and all at relatively low system demand.

Combined with the lower graphical and CPU demands of the virtually exclusive indoor environments of the Nakatomi Plaza high-rise setting, this means the game should play well on low-end systems while still looking pretty damn good.

The demo bears this out - it looks and feels somewhere between NOLF and another great Sierra game, Swat 3: Close Quarters Battle as it begins with you barefoot, standing in a lift shaft with a captured MP5, your Beretta 9 mm and trusty Zippo. The terrorists are planting bombs and you have a limited time to take them out, find some wire cutters and disable the bombs before Nakatomi Plaza (and your ex-wife) get blown sky-high.

As you set about going after the terrorists a number of promising features of the game strike you. The first is the sound and voice acting. Despite not having Bruce Willis on board, the voice acting - including familiar lines from the movie - appears to be of a consistently high standard, and close enough to the original material to be convincing (they do have the 'real' Officer Powell in the cast).

The graphics are good, smooth and crisp. At this stage the AI looks pretty good - as it was in NOLF, with the terrorists generally trying not to get shot - crouching to fire, ducking behind tables, and rolling around to make themselves harder to hit. They also lean around corners to shoot at you. Leaning is an option for players too, a useful move that will feel quite natural to Rogue Spear players but less so to Counter-Strike addicts.

The game is quite 'Hollywood' in feel. It is not a realistic, one-shot-kill exercise. You will have to spray the terrorists quite severely with the MP5 to take them down. Less so if you can control the recoil enough to make head-shots. Similarly you can take a reasonable amount of punishment before dying and being forced to restart the level, although finding first aid posts in various locations will help to patch you up through to the next stage.

But setting the demo apart from a Serious Sam or Doom-style spray and pray type actioner is a system of health, stamina and morale. Health you lose by getting shot, and gain by healing. Stamina prevents you from running or jumping for long stretches at a time (McClane was a hefty smoker, after all ...). Morale doesn't seem to figure in the demo but apparently it affects your own, enemy, and hostage behaviour depending on how well you are doing at any given time in terms of accuracy, health, time left to complete goals and so on.

The result is that you have be more judicious about the balance between between fast, furious and inaccurate, and controlling your aggression and taking a more measured and cautious approach to level mission goals.

The demo provides a few stages with a reasonable amount of variety. The levels do appear to be extremely linear, with you movements very much directed by 'locked door syndrome'. Even within the few demo levels, areas you revisit will have different doors available for you to open at different times depending where the game wants you to go. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing: Clive Barker's Undying used the same device to keep the heavily story-driven game moving towards the scripted sequences. And since the developers are setting out to recreate the movie, it seems not only understandable but in fact unavoidable to do the same here.

The final game's 38 single player levels will nevertheless cover all 40 floors of the Nakatomi Plaza building. Apparently there is no multiplayer planned at this stage, though Sierra's track record would indicate that they are responsive to community demand for multiplayer expansions if that demand arises.

As well as the basic weapons - Beretta 9 mm pistol and an H&K MP5 submachine gun - an M-60 machine gun is also promised in the game. Terrorists seem to throw grenades at you occasionally in the demo levels, but it's unclear whether you will also be able to use them. Whether there are more weapons in the full game remains to be seen.

Completing the John McClane kit-out is a handheld radio to talk to Officer Powell down on the street, for hints or just to shoot the breeze. You also have a badge to flash at Swat members later in the game to stop them from shooting you, and to convince hostages that you are a good guy.

All in all, Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza looks to be a very well-put togther and entertaining single-player actioner experience. Whether it becomes a bona fide classic like its source material, only time will tell. We'll find out in late April. Meanwhile, we're excited - yippee-ki-yay!

Show me the screenshots!

Check out the Official Site.