Review – Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days
Let me start this review by showing you guys the thing I saw the most throughout the entire game:
Off to a great start.
This happened four times during my first hour of self-inflicted torture with Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days, a title that has quickly earned the privilege of being considered one of the worst movie-based video games of all time. The 2006 game wasn’t good at all, but compared to this new iteration, oh my, does it shine.
First of all, I have no idea why developers keep thinking Reservoir Dogs is a good source material for a game. Haven’t you guys seen the damn picture? It’s a movie clearly focused on dialogue and the violence is rampant because the heist went wrong! If you want to make a game based off a Tarantino movie, hell, Kill Bill would be a great hack & slash, do that instead!
This is a very ugly game.
Second of all, who the hell thought that cartoonish visuals would fit well with Reservoir Dogs? That cinematic trailer alone was already incredibly off-putting, with borderline Pixar visuals and unbelievably ugly characters who look absolutely nothing like their counterparts.
Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) looks like a hybrid of Horizon‘s Aloy with a hobo. Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) looks like Christopher Walken. Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) looks like a grown-up version of South Park’s Tweek (the caffeine-addicted paranoid kid). Dear lord, Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino) looks like a gorilla. The lack of fidelity to the source material is baffling. It also doesn’t help that the game itself is pretty ugly. It looks cheap and dated, like a (bad) Playstation 2 game. There is also no voice acting, no official soundtrack from the movie, no K-Billy’s “Super Sounds of the Seventies”. Just a very very forgettable soundtrack you constantly forget it even exists.
As portrayed by not Harvey Keitel and definitely not Quentin Tarantino.
Gameplay-wise, Bloody Days is a failure. It controls very poorly, with terrible aiming precision, unresponsive commands and a very clunky field of view which never allows you to properly get to know your surroundings or aim decently at a cop three feet away from you. If you’re going to copy Hotline Miami, as it seemed like it, you should have also used its top-down perspective, and not a Sims-esque isometric one.
The game’s main “selling point” was its rewind mechanic, which, ironically enough, turned out to be its most irritating aspect. What it really means is that, after your main character has performed an action, you can use this rewind mechanic to go revert back to the beginning of the checkpoint with another character, while the main baddie will perform exactly what you have just done. On paper, it sounds interesting. In reality, it acts as a means to disguise the fact that your allies cannot be controlled by the AI, and you have to program every single action by yourself. Due to this, every single session feels less like a means to strategy and more like a very tiresome chore to carry everyone from point A to point B. Did I also mention the game features no co-op multiplayer? Because it doesn’t. And it’s stupid.
The game is also buggy beyond human comprehension. The amount of times the game crashed while I was playing was shameful. It even froze my computer at a point.
The rewind mechanic is awful, by the way.
Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days fails miserably as a Reservoir Dogs tie-in. It fails miserably as a twin-stick shooter. Hell, it even fails miserably as a borderline passable game. This game is just absurdely bad, with bad visuals, bad soundtrack, terrible controls, a forced mechanic that’s nowhere near as useful or entertaining as the developers think it is, and way too many bugs to be ignored. Bloody Days doesn’t even deserve the world’s smallest violin.
I’m so goddamn mad hollering at this game that I can hardly talk.
