What are you left with if you remove the crude banter, testy relationships and striking performances that made Reservoir Dogs a celebrated film 25 years ago? The answer is Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days.
When Reservoir Dogs was released in 1992, it was unlike anything of its era. Director Quentin Tarantino demonstrated an unapologetic eye for graphic violence and an ear for quick-witted dialogue. The film also used a complicated, nonlinear storytelling structure, proving that Tarantino was more than just an above-average writer; he was a director who wasn’t afraid of taking risks and going against mainstream conventions.
That’s part of what makes Bloody Days so disappointing. It attempts to pay homage to Tarantino’s heist-gone-wrong movie, but lacks any of the ingredients to do so.
In Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days, players take control of the popular film’s thieves: Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, Mr. Blonde and Mr. Pink. Using an ability that allows the player to rewind time and switch between the characters on the fly, the player’s ultimate goal in each level is to enter a highlighted building seen on a city map, find the pile of money waiting inside and take out armed men that try to prevent them from doing so. What little story Bloody Days has is conveyed via moments of dialogue that appear in bubbles on screen, but plot isn’t the goal here. The focus of the game is based entirely on getting into a building and getting out of it without dying.
Virtually every level of Bloody Days can be summed up in the same couple of sentences, and that predictability makes for a tedious experience. The location changes, but the gameplay never does. Your enemies grow in numbers, but never become more challenging. The frustration I had with the game stemmed not from unbeatable or even difficult levels, but from the inability to do anything more than use the same simple tactics I employed from the very beginning.
Even the rewards system doesn’t feel fleshed out. You have to progress through different levels to unlock new characters. Since there’s no real story to speak of, playable characters kind of just appear with no rhyme or reason attached. You don’t unlock characters by accruing a certain number of points or purchasing them from a menu; instead, Bloody Days just hands out new characters at random.
After I began the game as Mr. Brown, the first new character I was given access to was Mr. Pink, who is played by Steve Buscemi in the film. It’s worth noting here that while developer Big Games was able to score the Reservoir Dogs license, it did not nail down the ability to use likenesses for any of the actors from the film, so Mr. Pink looks nothing like Buscemi. Even worse, he adds nothing special to the gameplay. Individual characters don’t have different strengths and weaknesses; there’s no reason to rotate them in and out. They’re essentially just palette swaps.
Since there’s no difference between the playable characters, the strategies you can employ in each level dry out pretty quickly. Before long, I just wanted to blast through as quickly as possible. Instead of engaging in extensive gunfights, I discovered that if I picked up a baton from a fallen security guard, I could hide behind a wall and draw my enemies out. I spent quite a few levels just waiting for gunmen to come toward me so I could quickly get rid of them and move on to the next level. This made particularly drawn-out, subpar missions a lot easier, but it sure didn’t make them any more fun.
This is where Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days’ most interesting gameplay mechanic should have come into play. Think of Bloody Days as a single-player co-op game; you control a number of characters in each level. You start by controlling just one, creating a sort of recording of the actions and path through the level you want them to take. Then, using the ability to rewind time, you take control of the second, while the first runs through that pattern you laid out.
So let’s say you start a level as Mr. Brown. Minutes into a successful run, a police officer appears out of nowhere and gets off a couple of shots, leaving Mr. Brown running low on health. You can rewind that segment and start playing as Mr. Blue to try to alter the series of events. Mr. Blue can focus solely on killing that cop before he injures Brown, leaving your first character healthy and ready to continue through the level.
Bloody Days’ time rewind mechanic sounds cool on paper and has a lot of potential, but the situations in which it actually works are limited. It’s at its best during timed levels, where it’s nearly impossible to succeed without manipulating the clock in some way. These missions tend to have an increased number of enemies because of how many characters you get to control. Trying to get through with one person will ultimately end up with him dying. I found that using a rapid-fire technique with the time rewind mechanism was the only way to complete the level, and that it presented a new, challenging aspect the game was missing.
The problem, however, is that rewinding time to fix problems failed more often than not. When I was first introduced to the mechanic, I understood that as long as the second character doesn’t interfere with what the first character has done, nothing changes. Simply put, if I didn’t want to alter the past, all I had to do was stand out of the way. This formula doesn’t always work, however, and I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with trying to guess when it would operate how I wanted it to and when it would simply fail me.
During one particular mission, I used Mr. Brown to clear a floor. Based on earlier levels where I used the same technique, I would just guide Mr. Pink behind Mr. Brown when time was rewound and I needed to get both characters to the checkpoint. It worked the first few times, so I didn’t think much about it. Using that same interference-free strategy, however, Mr. Brown was still killed by an NPC that he had taken out earlier. This, based on the precedent the game set, shouldn’t have happened.
It wasn’t just the problematic gameplay mechanics that left me bewildered with Bloody Days. It’s difficult trying to figure out how Bloody Days fits into Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Besides the names of the characters, the only other resemblance the game has to the movie is its level of violence and character quotes that appear between missions. When Bloody Days tries to remind players they’re in a world based on Tarantino’s movie, the effort comes off as obnoxious. References to famous scenes — the tipping scene from the film’s opening makes an appearance early on in the game — feel forced, like there was a contractual obligation to hit a certain quota. The film license is used as an excuse to exchange any meaningful narrative for dashes of fan service — and that’s a poor substitute.
Source: Polygon – Full
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