2006's 'Reservoir Dogs' Video Game is a Very Strange Way to Experience 'Reservoir Dogs'
Games based on movies have almost always had a bad reputation. A commonly stated reason for them being so consistently lackluster is they’re often developed with an inflexible release date that coincides with the release of their source material. Delays aren’t an option, and anyone familiar with game development knows that delays sort of need to be an option. The Cars 2 video game doesn’t have to be good, you see, they just need it on the shelf the same day the movie comes out.
Movie-inspired games that came out well after the film’s release shouldn’t have this problem though, right? I think of something like Rockstar’s The Warriors, or 2002’s The Thing. It appears that less hurried circumstances lead to better end results and that maybe there are different rules in these cases. Hell, even GoldenEye 007, probably the best video game-to-movie adaptation of all time, came out three years after the Pierce Brosnan vehicle hit theaters.
If you can shake the overall absurdity of the notion, I believe a Reservoir Dogs video game coming out in 2006, 14 years after the film’s release, actually makes a decent bit of sense! After all, it’s a post-Grand Theft Auto III crime-centered game based on the cult classic debut of Quentin Tarantino, one of this generation’s most popular filmmakers. For god’s sake, the whole thing is based on the events of an action sequence that isn’t even shown in the movie! I don’t know if it was a good idea, but I’m here to tell you it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard for a video game.
The Reservoir Dogs game isn’t terrible. It’s not great, it’s not a disaster, it’s just a game that you can play. I could see having this growing up and running through it in a single session once in a while. I had a few games like that on my childhood NES, with Guerilla War being the closest comparison I can think of. A bland, repetitive Ikari Warriors knockoff, it’s 10 levels of running and shooting through a warzone. You have infinite lives and ammo and it all just sort of happens and then it’s over. I’d beat it on a Saturday morning, take a second to think “I just beat that video game,” and move on with my day. Reservoir Dogs easily could’ve been Guerilla War to a kid 15 years younger than me, if the characters in Guerilla War swore at each other the entire time.
So yeah, the game’s not great, but I do admire what the team did with this stupid idea. If you’re halfway curious, I’d say it’s worth checking out. It would be a great game to rent if that was still a thing. You could either beat it over a few days, or knock it right out in a single sitting, return it a few hours later saying the disc was scratched, and take home something else instead.
In case you’re not familiar, Reservoir Dogs is a story about a group of criminals who don’t know each other that get put together to rob a jewelry store, using color-based code names to identify each other all the while. The 1992 film focuses on the preparation and subsequent fallout from the botched job and would inspire one million hyperviolent and stylized independent movies that played fast and loose with timelines and pop culture references. None of these imitators would come close to the joys of Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino’s follow-up, Pulp Fiction, of course.
Whereas the movie inspired a plethora of copycats, the game borrows heavily and obviously from titles that came before it. It’s essentially Grand Theft Auto’s Oops! All Missions mixed with an off-brand Max Payne game, where you find painkillers in medicine cabinets no matter where you are, and are prone to entering fits of slow-motion bullet time to wipe out a dozen cops at once.
The campaign begins with an obligatory tutorial that I found hilarious yet oddly inspired. The Dogs want to put Mr. Orange through some trials since they’re not sure about this rookie on their team. This is a quick lesson that covers hostage taking, cop killing, and uh, paintball with the boys.
Honestly, it’s cool to run around in the warehouse setting that serves as the gang’s rendezvous. I realized that it might be the least extravagant movie location that feels iconic to me. I’m like, “Whoa, there’s that ramp! And there’s the room that Mr. White combs his hair in! They even have the big bottles of soap up on the shelf!”
The new dialogue given to the characters isn’t particularly quippy or pop-culture-focused, such as in the movie, but that’s probably for the best. No one wants to hear half-baked Tarantino dialogue. The developers do demonstrate a knowledge of the characters, however. Mr. Pink finds the time to rant about service workers in one cutscene, and I thought Joe Cabot and his son Nice Guy Eddie’s oddly sweet relationship shined through a few times, even if Joe does look way too much like John Madden for my taste.
Perhaps the coolest part of the game, as well as an absolute no-brainer, is that they got to use the music from the movie. It’s a major score, as Reservoir Dogs has a stellar soundtrack. They also even added a few songs that wouldn’t be out of place on K-BILLY’s Super Sounds of the ‘70s, even if the game did bizarrely choose to eschew the fictional radio station heard and discussed throughout the movie. Kind of a blown opportunity to not entwine that into the soundtrack, seeing as how the music is generally being played on in-game radios. And even if Stephen Wright wasn’t available to reprise his role as the DJ, surely they could’ve introduced a new one.
Regardless, the music provides a great soundtrack to the driving missions, pairing well with Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde telling you fucked up stories. This is especially a highlight because he’s the only cast member who reprised his role for the game. The rest of the actors are doing imitations, and while it’s fun to hear extended Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino impressions, you’d never confuse them for the real guys. The whole thing tends to feel like a community theater production of Reservoir Dogs that somehow landed Michael Madsen. People knock on that Sopranos PS2 game, and I’m sure I’ll get to it one day soon, but it deserves credit for getting all the principal mobsters to appear.
If you only get one character to reprise their role, however, Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde is as good as it gets. You get the voice of one of Tarantino’s most oft-used actors, giving the whole thing a feeling of authenticity. The character of Blonde is also one of the movie’s most memorable — a cold psychopath underneath a carefree exterior, literally singing and dancing one moment and torturing a cop the next. A great role, perfectly cast. There’s tons of dialogue in this game, but my favorite moment was a simple reaction from Madsen during a driving level:
“Fuck me, that was close.”
Not much to look at, but out of Madsen’s mouth, it’s fucking goddamn Shakespeare.
Developers made a wise decision to design new versions of the rest of the cast, rather than trying to recreate all of the actors from the movie. They might look vaguely like their cinematic counterparts, but like the recent Avengers game, it’s clear that the digital versions of Messieurs Orange, Blue, and Co. are intended to look a little different from the actors we associate them with. A tough spot for developers, as realistic portrayals were bound to disappoint, but the new versions felt off and constantly reminded me of other people. From behind Mr. White was a dead ringer for Ben Stein, and Mr. Orange looked like a young Leonardo DiCaprio.
So maybe it’s less a community theater production of Reservoir Dogs and more some fever-dream alternate version of Reservoir Dogs. One that is four hours long and features a lot more car chases, explosions, and shootouts with helicopters.
That’s a part of this game that’s hard to shake, but a necessary wrinkle that you must accept — the movie Reservoir Dogs apparently features a lot of guys that talk about pop songs and Charles Bronson instead of about the Michael Bay shit they just got into on their way there. Maybe they’re too focused on the current situation at hand, but I feel like they probably just don’t think anyone would believe them.
The game puts you in two types of levels: either running & gunning or driving. You can generally kill everyone and be branded a psychopath by the game, or you could just point guns at everybody and occasionally strike a hostage and be deemed a professional. There’s also an in-between classification in the middle, for if you only want to kill people sometimes. You’ll receive one of the game’s three endings based on where you’re classified by the end.
This is a four-hour game based on a 90-minute feature, and it feels like about an hour of it is just the movie itself recreated via PS2 cutscenes. At first, I thought it was fun seeing memorable moments from the movie recreated or alluded to (including cops hanging out and talking shit in a public bathroom and Mr. Blonde stopping off for a soda and French fries), but by the end, you’ve seen just about the whole movie, save for Mr. Orange’s Commode Story and Mr. Brown’s ‘Like a Virgin’ monologue. It’s way too much, and it all starts to feel like padding in between the short and similar levels.
I’ve taken some shots at the game’s length and originality, but I must confess that it’s probably exactly as long as it should be, and that clever little surprises kept appearing throughout the game. It’s composed of 15 very repetitive levels, there’s no way around that, but by the end I was driving as Mr. Brown, post-robbery, as the dying character struggles to see the road, blood from his wounds seeping into his eyes. It’s a single line of dialogue from the movie creatively expanded into a whole level. The blood-in-eyes effect is demonstrated very similarly to the ink effect in Mario Kart 8, splotching on the game’s camera and obscuring the player’s view.
Earlier I mentioned that you’ll get one of three endings depending on if you were a psycho, a professional criminal, or a bit of both. That’s a bit misleading, though. The ending is the same as the movie, as it should be. And the “ending” you unlock is one of three little extra bits that play out as the end credits roll, with Mr. Pink meeting various fates, a fun nod to one of the chief discussions people have when they talk about Reservoir Dogs.
After Mr. Pink's ending, the credits keep rolling and we’re treated to (fake) Mr. Brown’s ‘Like a Virgin,’ monologue after all. Props on using the entire buffalo there, guys. I didn’t think you’d do it.
I laughed at this when I realized there had to be at least one kid out there who didn’t know what the hell Reservoir Dogs was and just played whatever shooty game he could get his hands on. For his efforts, that child was rewarded with a speech about the kinds of dicks Madonna liked to have sex with.
What was an effective character-building introduction to the movie becomes one of the more inexplicable game endings I’ve seen in a while, and is probably the most tonally consistent way to end this baffling yet strangely enjoyable game.
