Hotline: Rhode Island

Reservoir Dogs in its odd quirky way was a film in 1992 that catapulted Quentin Tarantino into the limelight, and as such has a massive fan following. Bloody Days seeks to capitalize on that cult fervor by making a game in which you not only play through the movie, but bring the heist gang together and pull multiple jobs along the way leading up to what would be the movie job.  You can play as all of the gangsters from the film, and there are 18 heists in total that you can attempt.

With the likes of Payday and GTA 5 leading the way in modern views of video games with large parts concerning bank heists, they have shown that it can be fun, it can be suspenseful, but more than anything successful. RD: BD takes a different approach, with their rewind system, that lets you play as one character for a while, then you switch to a different one before the first character goes. This is actually a pretty neat system on paper, allowing for lots of different combos and scenarios to play out very differently with other party members having their own job to complete simultaneously.

However, it rarely turns out to be useful, as you do everything you can with one character, then with the next, you usually provide support, but because the enemies are dynamic in nature, that great plan you had to combine forces goes right out the window because the second character completely changes the pattern of the enemies for the first guy, so you end up shooting in the wrong spot almost constantly. Also, it’s not so bad with 2 or so players, but with up to 6, playing the same part over and over literally with different people gets really old quickly, unlike say an XCOM type game, where you still tactically move everyone into place, but it’s from a different perspective, and you don’t always have to start from the same place.

While this is a Reservoir Dogs movie game, it’s incredibly misleading. It does have elements from the movie in the gameplay and setting, but the license for likenesses was probably never bought, since almost none of the characters look ANYTHING like their incredibly well known and loved actors, which is a huge misstep. There are quotes and scenes from the movie to be sure, but they have no impact whatsoever, and just feel like they were put there at random, or to fill a quota. From a director known for incredible dialogue, we have now a faded copy of the original.

Bloody indeed

The graphics are nothing to write home about, and with the characters looking totally different, it’s hard to pick out who is who. But even if you could tell the difference they all play very similarly despite having very subtle but varied buffs, but its such a small difference, that it never comes up in gameplay. So, with the amazing source material, we have a lackluster attempt at a classic movie that has very few game adaptions already, and probably won’t be many to come. The ideas are there: A) an RD game could be great, B) the rewind system is pretty cool, but it all falls flat on execution. I was really hoping for more with such a title, but it seems the curse of the movie video game is alive and well, and we will have to wait another 25 years for someone to break it.