You half expect Mr Pink to say something like “Do you know who we are? We’re the Reservoir Dogs, motherfuckers!” When it’s not remixing lines from the script, it reads like a film school student's botched Tarantino imitation. What dialogue there is comes in unvoiced speech bubbles, limited to quippy one-liners and mission directions of dubious quality. There’s no story to speak of, and the group’s dynamic is nowhere to be seen, with no trace of characterisation or relationships. The game’s expansions to the Reservoir Dogs mythology consist of: the same crew committing a slew of other robberies. Game-over screens display randomly-chosen Reservoir Dogs quotes, and not even necessarily good ones, like Big Games fed the entire screenplay into a random quote machine. The robbable buildings are named, clumsily, after Tarantino characters: Hotel Alabama, Marsellus Cars, Landa National Bank.
Reservoir dogs bloody days license#
Elsewhere, the use of the license is even more stultifying. Though Big Games obtained the rights to the film’s title, characters, and situations, it failed to get the likeness rights for its actors (likely much more expensive and elusive), reducing Mssrs Brown, Blonde, White et al to lumpy action figures with no real resemblance to the iconic actors who originated them. Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days’ use of the Reservoir Dogs license is not just disappointing: it’s bad fan fiction. The last decade or so, though, has been something of a golden age for licensed games, with the likes of Arkham Asylum, Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation, the Lego series, and Star Wars: Battlefront delivering strong gameplay and fidelity to their source material.īut even in a golden age, outliers inevitably come along to piss in the pudding. Hastily thrown together, often to meet a tie-in deadline, they almost never rose above mediocrity. Licensed video games have historically occupied the lower rungs of the quality ladder.