Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Reservoir Dogs

1. Official Site
2. Platform: Xbox
3. Publisher: Eidos Interactive
4. Developer: SCi Games Limited
5. Release Date: 10/24/06
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

"I'd go over twelve percent for that." – Nice Guy Eddie

Quentin Tarantino made his name and reputation all in one go with the 1992 film Reservoir Dogs. Known for his lightning fast speech, encyclopedic knowledge of pre-1980 cinema, and willingness to cover his actors in blood at any opportunity, Tarantino’s name was born with a harsh crime film starring a who’s-who of character actors. It remains my personal favorite of his films and it has aged very, very well. The story is simple enough: A group of criminals are recruited by a veteran named Joe to stage a diamond heist, and each is given a color-related nickname for the job. Everything goes according to plan until the heist itself turns into a bloodbath.

That’s when they realize there’s a cop among them.

The resulting paranoia, tension, dramatic monologues and gunslinging is an absolutely riveting experience to watch. Heck, the first two scenes alone guarantee whether someone is going to be into the film or not. If the profane hilarity of the opening coffee shop has someone on the hook, then the car ride immediately after the credits will ensure whether the viewer stays with it or immediately shuts it off. It would have been wonderful had the game captured any of the emotions from the movie, but about the only things similar are the names, circumstances, and foul language.

Other than that, Reservoir Dogs the game is a complete waste of your time and effort.

"I like her early stuff. You know, "Lucky Star," "Borderline" – but once she got into her "Papa Don't Preach" phase, I don't know, I tuned out." – Mr. Blue

When we saw Reservoir Dogs at E3 this year we couldn’t get over how ugly it looked. We figured it must have been an alpha build and they were just showing off how things would play. Oh, how wrong we were. Apparently that was a near-final version of the game because I found not one lick of difference between the visuals of the E3 demonstration and the final game for review. The in-game environments are bland and repetitive and while the story itself may be non-linear, the levels most assuredly are.

Characters aren’t blocky so much as they are bulky. Whenever you run around on foot it’s like you’re controlling a large black suit that’s waving around a shotgun. The animation whenever cops lay down their weapons is well done, but they only do it one exact way every time. Ditto whenever cops and civilians are neutralized and drop to their knees against the wall. As for the vehicles, the best one can say about them is that at least they break apart nicely during the car chases. Otherwise everything on the freeway is just as bland as on the street. Things just fly by faster when you’re behind the wheel.

Since the game focuses on the unseen robbery from the film and how everyone escaped from it the developers picked each character to spin a tale about. Each character covers the same stretch of land be it on foot or in a car, with Mr. Blonde’s escapade in the mall the lone exception. But that is the one time when the game actually comes to semi-life with the rest of the visuals encompassing bland industrial warehouses, back alleys, and train yards. These locations are dull by their very nature but look no further than F.E.A.R. to see how one can inject some adrenaline into them. It takes a little imagination and a lot of graphical rendering to pull off quality immersion and unfortunately neither is present in Reservoir Dogs.

The cinematic cut-scenes even manage to look drab and uninspired and are rendered (pun intended) all the more so since only Michael Madsen agreed to participate. The rest of the crooks look nothing like their cinematic counterparts and it’s tough to let go of seeing Tim Roth squirming on the floor or Harvey Keitel squaring off with Steve Buscemi.

"If you wanna know something and he won't tell you, cut off one of his fingers. The little one. Then tell him his thumb's next. After that he'll tell you if he wears ladies underwear. I'm hungry. Let's get a taco." – Mr. White

Voice acting must be a tricky thing because it’s obvious not every one can do it. Case in point: The voice actor for Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs. During his late-game driving mission you’ll find yourself either muting it or smashing in the front of the television. Yes, he truly hits that magical level of annoyance where destroying your entire entertainment center is preferable to listening to another word come out of his mouth. It doesn’t help when the game’s writing lacks the spark Tarantino infused into the film’s script so instead it comes off like the creative team was trying too hard.

Only Michael Madsen appears from the original cast and he exudes the same sort of menace in-game as he did in the movie. It’s probably more a result of his experience than any sort of enthusiasm because he’s quite capable of half-assing it (Species 2 or Bloodrayne anyone?) when he’s just there for the paycheck. Regardless, his missions are definitely the high point of the game because you feel as though you’re controlling one of the characters from the movie, if only for a short while.

The remaining sound effects are all pretty basic. You have car tires screeching, cars crumpling as they slam into each other or near-by trees. Weapons and explosions all sound fine and none of them stuck out as either spectacular or awful. Everything here is perfectly average which still manages to put it above how the game itself plays. Also, the soundtrack from the movie is used throughout on both car radios and the random radio. Players will find themselves walking through a corridor with a hostage and then hear figments of a song from the soundtrack. Go around a corner and a guard at a watch station has a radio tuned to K-Billy’s Sounds of the ‘70’s. It’s a nice touch, and a solid homage to the film.

"Look, if you ask me to sign something that says the government shouldn't do that, I'll sign it, put it to a vote, I'll vote for it, but what I won't do is play ball. And as for this non-college bulls%#^ I got two words for that: learn to f@^&in' type, 'cause if you're expecting me to help out with the rent you're in for a big f@^&in' surprise." - Mr. Pink

The controls are pretty basic in Reservoir Dogs and before I get into the main reason for the low score I’ll walk through what everything on the Xbox controller does. The left trigger is for targeting (or reversing when in the car), the right trigger is for shooting (or for accelerating when in the car), the A button activates doors or reloads your weapon, the B button grabs or releases hostages, and you hit the A button again whenever you need to rough up a hostage. The Y button makes demands of cops and civilians and then neutralizes them once they’ve submitted to you while under duress. The thumbsticks control movement of not only your character but also enemies under your control.

The developers of this game came up with a system by which players can hold cops and civilians hostage and then influence other cops and civilians to lay down their weapons thereby neutralizing them as a threat. Here’s how it works: Players walk into a room and target a civilian. The civilian puts their hands up and holds still. The player walks over to the civilian then hits the B button and grabs them as a hostage. The player and their hostage both walk slowly out of a building but are suddenly surrounded by cops. The player hits the A button thus whacking the hostage over the head with a gun. Since the cops do not want any more harm to come to the player they lay down their guns and put their hands up. The player then points at each individual cop, pulls the left trigger to target them, then pushes the left thumbstick in the direction of the nearest wall or car. When the cop gets there the Y button is pushed and the cop drops to his or her knees and laces their fingers behind their head. That threat is thus neutralized and then the player does it to the remaining cops.

Or the player can go all Maniac Cop on them and start blasting everyone in sight.

As for the main beef with the controls, hop behind the wheel during one of the driving missions and try to drive it in a straight line. While the character controls are fine if a bit clunky, the controls for the driving missions is flat-out unwieldy. Yours Truly found himself smashing into trees and other vehicles with astounding regularity and while my driving record is far from flawless even this proved ridiculous. Hitting the Y button to activate a turbo boost is fine in principle but it’s silly if the majority of turns on the road are 90-degrees. It also doesn’t help when the cops are on your tail and simply plow straight into you throwing you into a wreck you’ll then spend the next minute trying to back out of.

"Clowns to the left of me... Jokers to the right of me... here I am, stuck in the middle with you..." – "Stuck in the Middle with You"

One thing players can expect to see in Reservoir Dogs is a lot of the same scenery. The robbery in the film was handled off-screen and the movie was essentially the build-up to and the fall-out from this key event. The developers took a similar approach in the game but reversed it. The game drops players into the middle of the robbery and then handles the various escapes from it. As such, every time the player takes control of one of the characters they are treading over familiar turf be it the actual location of the robbery itself or the primary highway leading away from it. Throughout the course of the game you take up the mantle at some point of every crook save Joe himself.

There are 15 playable chapters in all and since you should be able to burn through each one in less than 20 minutes the game won’t take you that long. I still beat the game in four hours even factoring in a dinner break to watch some TV once My Fair Lady arrived home. The majority of the game is explored while characters are on foot, but there are a few driving missions scattered throughout. Players can handle situations any way they choose and are judged on three criteria. They can play as Professionals, Career Criminals, or Psychopaths. This is how the marketing department decided to spin the de facto standards of Good, Average, and Evil. How you play the game decides which of the three possible endings you unlock.

One very cool aspect of this is that anything one character does in a given chapter affects characters in later chapters. When players first start the game, they can backtrack through the level at one point and shoot off a lock on a door. This didn’t make much sense at the time but when I played through that exact same level a few chapters later the fact that this door was open saved me from a few headaches. This is a good idea considering how the game constantly doubles back on itself, but it will rarely if ever affect whether you live or die on a mission.

My primary issue with Reservoir Dogs is that it’s just a "meh" title. There’s nothing to truly recommend about it even without its heritage since the graphics are washed out, the driving sequences amount to little more of gunning it, and the third-person missions depend on how fast you can either shoot everyone or jump between hostages. The hostage system that was devised is a solid idea, especially since the hostage’s "consciousness meter" will lower as you drag them along. It drops significantly once you clock them with your weapon, so quickly neutralizing threats and jumping to a fresh hostage will keep you alive. Used wisely this would have made things very tricky but there are so many cops and civilians on hand at any given moment that the clever player should have no trouble maintaining a hostage through even the most heated situation.

Since we all know the ending there’s little reason to play the game, in my ever-so-humble opinion. The movie was about the paranoia and disaster that followed an unseen robbery so making a game based around that one robbery still leads back to the film’s eventual ending. To the developers’ credit they don’t shy away from how things end but it strikes me as a waste of time to play this for four hours when I can watch the movie in around two. The game itself doesn’t help matters since the majority of it is very repetitive and unimaginative. It’s as though the team came up with an idea for a third-person action sequence, devised a lengthy driving mission, then copied each one a few times then called it a completed game. We saw this at E3 in May and it looked lame then but we hoped it would improve with further development.

Apparently it may as well have been the finished result because the completed game is extremely weak and not worth your time.

"Listen kid, I'm not gonna bulls^@* you, all right? I don't give a good f@^& what you know, or don't know, but I'm gonna torture you anyway, regardless. Not to get information. It's amusing, to me, to torture a cop. You can say anything you want cause I've heard it all before. All you can do is pray for a quick death, which you ain't gonna get." – Mr. Blonde

Players can unlock up to three endings (Professional, Career Criminal, and Psychopath) in Reservoir Dogs but since the game strictly adheres to the movie you can accurately guess where things wind up. If you don’t want to burn through the game again, just looking at the stills for those locked endings tells you exactly how things go down in the final moments. Collect 10 art files and a new art gallery is unlocked, but storyboards of basic warehouses and industrial buildings are fascinating for only so long.

Instead of spending four to five hours playing through the game, take two hours and check out the movie instead. It’s a vastly superior way to entertain yourself.

"Then one day she meets this John Holmes motherf@^&er and it's like, whoa baby, I mean this cat is like Charles Bronson in the 'Great Escape', he's digging tunnels. Now, she's gettin' the serious d*@% action and she's feeling something she ain't felt since forever. Pain. Pain." – Mr. Brown

Reservoir Dogs is little more than a cash-in on a great crime movie from the early '90’s. With bland graphics, bad voice acting, uninspired missions, and the ability to finish it within four hours Reservoir Dogs is little more than a rental at best. Or you can better spend your money by renting or buying the DVD of the movie and enjoy that in half the time you’d otherwise spend finishing the game. Skip tripe like this indefinitely.

Gaming Trend Score

62

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 70
3. Controls: 75
4. Gameplay: 60
5. Value/Replay: 40
6. OVERALL:62