On the Second Day of Die Hard, My True Love Gave To Me...

For all the qualms I had about the application of the Die HardThe 1980s were famous for the bombastic action films released during the decade. Featuring big burly men fighting other big burly men, often with more guns, bombs, and explosions than appear in Michael Bay's wildest dreams, the action films of the decade were heavy on spectacle, short on realism. And then came a little film called Die Hard that flipped the entire action genre on its head. license to Die Hard Arcade, there’s no denying it was an amusing game. It was fun, if maybe a tad too punishing, and it certainly found a way to be both inspired by Die Hard but also be a ridiculous and weird arcade experience. Maybe Sega could have toned it down some to better match the style and story of the Die Hard franchise, but Sega decided to go a different route, creating an over the top game that really didn’t suit John McClane. That doesn’t make it a bad game, just a bad Die Hard game, which isn’t necessarily the same thing.

That first game proved popular, though, likely because it was so action packed and over the top. It was popular enough that, two years later, Sega came back with a sequel. Well, a sequel to one version of it. Bear in mind that Sega only had the license for Western markets. Over in the East the original game was called Dynamite Deka, and it starred not John McClane but Bruno Delinger. For the sequel Sega dropped the pretense and didn’t even bother with the Die Hard license at all. Out went John McClane, in came Bruno Delinger for all markets, and the game could find its purest, truest self.

What that meant is that the game didn’t even need to try and be grounded at all (not that Die Hard Arcade tried too hard). For the sequel, Dynamite Cop (or Dynamite Deka 2 in Japan), all pretense of making something grounded and realistic was thrown out. Instead we got hero cops on a truly ridiculous adventure, fighting terrorists, pirates, islanders, and even kraken, all to once again save the President’s daughter and defeat the evil of the land. It’s stupid and silly and pretty crazy, but that suits the sequel just fine.

Dynamite Cop finds the hero cop of the first game, Bruno Delinger, joined by two new recruits, Jean Ivy and Eddie Brown, as they’re called into battle against the evil terrorist Wolf "White Fang" Hongo. Once again the terrorist leader and his men have taken a bunch of people hostage, although this time it’s aboard a boat instead of within a skyscraper. And, wouldn’t you know it, the President’s daughter is there again, an innocent bystander caught up in all the action and carnage. To save the girl Bruno and his team will have to barrel through the board, from stem to stern, all before chasing Wolf to an island for the final confrontation. It’s all in a day’s work for this dynamite hero cop.

The basics of Dynamite Cop don’t stray too far from Die Hard Arcade. You’re once again playing a brawler game with tight controls. You can punch and kick, do jumping attacks and ground points, as well as grapples and combos. One or two players can get in on the action, and there are plenty of enemies to fight, quick time events to avoid, and carnage to cause. It’s all the same as before, just bigger and sillier. It’s like the adage from 22 Jump Street: it’s the same case. Do the same thing.

Some things do get changed up a bit, though. It starts off the bat with the intro stage, which varies depending on which mission you take into the boat. You could come in from the air, via parachutes, or on boats to the ship, or you could swim in from underwater. Whatever you do sets the events on a slightly different trajectory for the early game, giving reason to come back in, pump a few extra quarters in, and see how each of these intro stages play out. The variance doesn’t last through the whole game, with the path settling down eventually to a standard linear progression, but the early stages having variety is a nice change of pace for the title.

Of course, when you consider this was a quarter munching machine where most players likely wouldn’t make it through to the later stages anyway, having the early stages have the most variety and variance makes sense. Anyone can easily see what the game has to offer early on, and then they could try a new path the next time they play. It’s a good way to reward repeated sessions and encourage players to try the game again and again even if they happened to die before they reached the end.

And they will die. A lot. Credit where it’s due, the early challenge of the game feels like it was lessened a lot from the previous title, meaning players could likely get through the first stage or two without needing to pump in a new quarter (which isn’t something I could say for the first game). But once they’re in deep and really rolling, that difficulty ramps up. It gets harder and harder as you go along, to the point where it’s likely all but the most experienced players will have to pump in multiple quarters just to finish off the end boss.

He is quite a doozy. Hongo makes his return here, and he’s a beast. Although he only has one battle this time (unlike the two consecutive battles he had in the previous game), he’s much ruder this time around. If he gets an attack in on you, expect to lose a quarter of your health, easy. He’s also a damage sponge, meaning that while he’ll deal tons of damage to you, he can soak a lot in return without even flinching. It’s a rough, tough fight, certainly the worst in the game, and he’s not for the faint of heart.

He’s not the only big encounter as you’ll find plenty of other foes in the game. There’s a solid mix of enemies to battle, and a few other big bosses to take on. My favorite was the battle against a kraken in the depths of the ship simply because it was so different, and so ridiculous, in the context of the game. Sure, this fight wouldn’t have worked if it were put into a Die Hard game, but now that the license is dropped I don’t really care. This is a fun, stupid fight that makes no sense in the story of the game, but that doesn’t matter. It’s just fun.

With all that said, the game isn’t perfect. The development felt like it was a little rushed, even with Sega clearly reusing the engine from the first title to make this sequel. This is most obviously noticed in some odd, graphic glitches, such as any close up of Hongo’s face. He very often is missing his lips from his 3D model, looking quite creepy and disturbing. The President’s daughter has the same issue in at least one scene, and the end result is pretty awful to look at. It’s the kind of graphical glitch you would have thought Sega would notice during development, so either they somehow missed it or it wasn’t worth fixing on the timeline they had. Like I said, it feels rushed in this aspect, which knocks it down just slightly from the height it could have reached.

Still, the game is sick fun. It’s a big, dumb brawler that feels like a proper sequel to the first game. Of course, you need to think of that first game as Dynamite Deka and not Die Hard Arcade because this is a terrible Die Hard title but a fantastically stupid brawler. If you can shut your brain off and just have fun, Dynamite Cop provides that in spades. Sega knew what they were doing and they managed to take just about everything that worked from the previous game and make it better.