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Not quite the classic that the film was but not a bad game either. Messing with a classic film is something that game developers have been doing a lot of recently. EA acquired The Godfather, Sierra acquired Scarface and now Eidos is joining the party with a rendition of Reservoir Dogs. The game follows the film’s story and tries to expand on the story a bit. As a quick recap, Reservoir Dogs starts a group of robbers who are trying to figure out who in their group rat-ed them out and made their jewel heist go horribly wrong.
Reservoir Dogs starred a collection of robbers with colorful names like Mr. Pink and Mr. Orange who were hired by Joe Cabot and Nice Guy Eddie, a pop and son gangster team, to executive a jewel heist. It didn’t turn out so well since they were met on the scene with dozens of cops. The game follows the same storyline of the film and expounds on it just a bit more. Many of the movie’s key scenes are retold here in CGI, although don’t expect to have the full story. Reservoir Dogs, the game, is best enjoyed if you have already watched the film and are only using the game as a refresher.
Reservoir Dogs, the movie, as a bit light on action so it wasn’t the most obvious choice for a game. The game is made up of many shoot-outs and car chases. As expected, in the shoot-outs you’ll be shooting your way out of somewhere, usually trying to get to a certain location and you’ll be doing pretty much the same thing in the car chases. You’re given machine guns, sniper rifles, shotguns and many pistols to accomplish this with. The game makes things somewhat interesting (and puts it license to use) by letting you take hostages and threaten cops with killing that person. Obviously, they’ll stop shooting at you. Once you have had the hostage for a while, you can even force the cop to drop his weapon and of course, you can have your way with him.
The problem with Reservoir Dogs is that some of the gameplay mechanics are broken. The game’s aiming system is inaccurate even if you have the enemy targeted with the target-lock button. The game does include a cover button to let you take cover against a wall but pulling this off successfully takes quite a bit of skill. To top it off, it’s not like the shooting and driving in the game is particularly exciting. It works—most of the time—but it isn’t something that you want to repeatedly do. The game lasts about six hours.
The game’s graphics are decidedly average. The character models aren’t very detailed at all the animation is fairly robotic. The environments look pretty good on their own but textures repeat way too often—sometimes in places that do not make sense. It makes the environments themselves seem repetitive. The cutscenes look pretty good thanks to having much more detailed characters with fluid animation.
The game’s audio certainly the highlight. The soundtrack sounds like it was ripped directly from the 70s with the most obvious inspiration being K-Billy’s “Super Sounds of the Seventies.” The game’s songs include George Baker’s “Little Green Bag” and Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.” Michael Madsen provides the voice acting for his character and obviously nails the performance. Eidos got sound-alikes for the other characters and while they obviously don’t sound perfect, they do a good job of nailing the characters’ personality.
Reservoir Dogs is a decent action game although fans of the movie will probably be disappointed that it is merely average. The action gameplay in the game has some noticeable flaws, but it isn’t enough to shelve the game. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Oct 30, 2006
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