- Xbox ››
- Action ››
- Reservoir Dogs
Reservoir Dogs
- November 13, 2006 16:04 PM PST
- Email this!
The trend of butchering classic movies with sub-par video game adaptations has got to stop. Too much gets lost in the translation and what begins as a good idea turns into something that smells suspiciously like a marketing scheme. Reservoir Dogs is the latest attempt to cash in on a cinematic masterpiece but falls way flat of the original.
- GamePro Score
- User Score
- Write your review!
You'd think that robbing a bank would be easy: gather a bunch of criminals and go in with guns blazing. However, something has gone horribly wrong; the perfect plan didn't include the bank being swarmed by police and not all of the bank robbers get out alive. The survivors of the debacle meet to point fingers and figure out what went wrong.
The Blame Game
PROTIP: Run away! There's no shame in running for cover and hiding offers you the chance to sneak in some cheap shots.
In Reservoir Dogs, you play as several members of the gang and try to reconstruct exactly what happened. Throughout the game, there are attempts to emulate Tarantino's style via flashbacks from several characters' perspectives. This worked out pretty well in the movie, but in the game it only confuses things as it is difficult to differentiate between past or present events.
Reservoir Dogs is part third-person shooter, part high-speed car chase. This creates a problem for game play, because every character you play is escaping from the same place and trying to get to the same meeting point. It doesn't take long for this scenario to become repetitive as you end up following a defined path that enemies such as police and security don't have to adhere to. The occasional present-tense adventure offers the opportunity to break from the monotony, but ultimately, there is very little freedom in Reservoir Dogs.
PROTIP: Shoot civilians or take them hostage. Left on their own, they will alert police.
The majority of Reservoir Dogs is third-person shooter. As you slip through the alleys and businesses that surround the bank, you have two separate methods for getting back to the meeting point, each with their own benefits and weaknesses. As a professional, use different strategies to avoid bloodshed: taking hostages to get police to back off, sneaking around corners and even disarming cops and locking them in closets. As a psychopath, the only strategy is to kill everything that moves.
Your arsenal includes a pistol plus any extra weapons you pick up along the way; shotguns, sniper rifles, even bullet proof shields. Shootouts increase your adrenaline and when that peaks, you gain a slight edge over enemies. If you choose, you can let the adrenaline take over and enter a state that is much like bullet time from the Matrix. However, the advantage is slight and this feature just seems to slow down game-play.
PROTIP: If you are outnumbered, you can retreat behind a corner and wait. When the cops come, you can pick them off one by one with head shots.
The high-speed car chases are the weak points of an already weak game. They offer little freedom in movement and tend to take you along the same route over and over. The controls are maddening, especially when simultaneously maneuvering the car and shooting at police cars. Destroying the car or failing your mission forces you to play the same level over and over which means you have to hear the same dialog as many times as it takes to be successful. You may want to turn the volume down, but than you'd miss what may be the best part of the game: the soundtrack. Car chases offer a chance to listen to a radio and hear some of the great music off the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack.
Reservoir Dogs should be a game that puts you right in the middle of a gang of thugs. But instead, arguments about the meaning of Madonna lyrics and trading stories about near misses with police make it a disjointed game of multiple perspectives and confusing timeframes. You're never really sure who you should be rooting for and end up completing missions without being sure why. Reservoir Dogs is a great movie but probably should have stayed on the big screen.
PROTIP: Just see the movie.
