The idea of a videogame based on the classic of Tarantino can not help making the ears harder to the most cinephile movie buffs, but also unleash some cold shiver.Violence, dialogue over the lines and the characterization of simple but spectacular characters, not to mention a very unique management of the timeline, made the film a contemporary classic and defined part of the director’s figure. However, we know well what usually happens when movies become videogames. The long distance compared to the original could hope for a project conceived without haste, but know immediately that even this time the cup of the tie-in done well will have to stay in the cellar to take dust.
Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days tries to bring on the PC the fascination of The Hyenas of Tarantino, will it succeed?
NOSEBLEED
The idea of the game is to take back the basic concept of the film, or a group of violent robbers, determined and who trust very little between them and multiply it by a series of shots, giving us gradually the control of a greater number of characters, with slightly different characteristics.
There’s the fastest way to fill in the money, the most accurate one, the one that collects the damage better and so on. Obviously these characters are none other than Mr. Brown, Mr. Pink and so on, however, forget even a vague resemblance to the original cast.
The only real link between film and video game are the clothes and some quotes scattered between the dialogues and loading screens, for the rest of the game could be set in space as among the gangsters of the ’20s.
Visually quite poor, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days presents a shot from above and a playable Miami Hotline style, but with much less artistic inspiration behind it and a repetitiveness of the situations quite wearing in the long run.
Basically all we have to do is go into a place, grab all the money and make our way through dozens of policemen with a not particularly good aim and a lack of artificial intelligence , which almost always brings them closer even when we are only equipped with white weapons.
The result is that often just stick behind a wall with a stick to solve every situation with a few hitches.
ERASE & REWIND
Despite a fairly widespread mediocrity, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days has a fairly interesting idea. Since we will have to control each character, we will obviously not be able to do it simultaneously. So, once you have made all the moves in real time with the first hyena we are commanding, we can rewind the time and move the second, while the first performs exactly the same actions as before. This allows you to get around the most complicated obstacles and get out of practice in virtually every situation, simply by trying to plan and learn from mistakes.
If, for example, with Mr. Brown we make two thugs of a rival gang, but behind us comes a third guy armed with a machine gun that starts shooting, just press the space bar, rewind time and use Mr. Pink to eliminate it before may harm our robbery mate. To dictate the times will always be the first hyena, so each action of the successive finds unfolding in the lapse of time that passes between the moment in which the action has begun and the one in which we have pressed the space bar. T
his mechanic will prove to be particularly useful when we have to perform a task in a very short time and we will not be able to count on a single robber. For example, when we have to rob a bank vault in less than thirty seconds, the rest will have to adapt to the situation. The idea is not bad, but apart from rare cases particularly complicated, most of the time we limit ourselves to neutralize almost all the threats with the first hyena, exploiting a not particularly brilliant artificial intelligence, and then make it follow from the others.
