If there’s one thing that we love to see it’s developers taking the leap and coming up with inventive ways to make gameplay experiences rewarding. Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days takes what you love about titles like the classic True Lies or the more recent Hotline Miami, and implements a more tactical approach instead of running and gunning your way through creating a bloodbath. While there is of course a lot of blood being spilled in Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days, players are required to be a little more meticulous with their way of approach otherwise the game can punish you in various ways. The time-rewind system allows players to assist, steal, and run a muck on the enemy, creating unique methods in order to secure the heist. If you enjoy titles that put your mind to the test and require that you be on alert at all times with turn based elements, then Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days just may be your game.

With all that being said however there are still plenty of issues that make the game feel a little less rewarding and at times more frustrating, which often robs you of the tactical experience. We’ll get into more gameplay details later but for now, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days is a game that consists of 18 challenging locations, all of which must be carefully conducted otherwise you’ll find yourself at the restart from checkpoint screen frequently. There are no health buffs and the ammo is limited, so experienced players in this genre may fancy this challenge. Expect to die a lot in the first half of the game and as you slowly progress, you find your tactics gradually improve. Be that as it may the scale of difficulty can be somewhat of a drawback for players who aren’t too familiar with this style of game, and for that reason we feel players may feel turned off after just a few of the early missions.

Being a fan of Hotline Miami, coming into Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days had me feeling quite thrilled to get in on the action. However once everything started to unfold, things just didn’t seem to sit very well on the conscience. For one the tutorial that’s provided at the beginning of the game isn’t as thorough as we thought it would be, which actually made things a little confusing during our early attempts at completing each location. The control scheme isn’t hard at all nor is the time-rewind feature, what’s difficult is knowing just when, why, where and how to optimize it to your advantage and that’s where things got a bit irritating. One moment you’re cruising through a location and you’re feeling great, then the other you’re growing frustrated because time-rewind doesn’t really provide any sufficient reward. The problem about Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days is that one player must control two characters almost simultaneously, which of course promotes the challenge, but because two characters must be correctly placed in positions to ensure you don’t get killed unnecessarily can be daunting at times.

What would’ve made this game so much better was to keep the time-rewind feature, but just be able to control one character all the way through. That in itself would’ve been more rewarding and perhaps more fun, since you’d still be able to take advantage of the games features without being too dependent on your other partner to progress. Often times we’d successfully clear a room with Mr. White for example, rewind to go back to Mr. Blue which respawns all the enemies that you already dealt with, and it just creates more problems. Why should we have to successfully clear a room twice in order to move on? It just becomes more of a task to clear out a room of enemies again and put your entire heist at risk. Of course you could plan things out to avoid such issues from plaguing the experience, but the AI at times can be random and even when you stick to the script they can ruin it. We don’t want to sound like we strongly dislike Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days because truthfully we don’t, it’s just that when you have to deal with not being able to move your camera to see enemies ahead or not being able to kill an enemy because of a lackluster aiming system, the experience really starts to wane.

No matter how adept your approach may be, there’s no avoiding a poor aiming system that doesn’t allow you to lock onto particular enemies at the most crucial moments. Having to guess where the enemy is up ahead is not very pleasing because that could potentially lead you into being bombarded, further fueling the irritation. The overall blueprint of the game is truly cool but it could’ve been designed differently to provide a more enriching experience. This is more of a personal thing than anything but it would’ve been nice to have a better selection of music being played, rather than this bland country and light rock mix that doesn’t even add any hype to all the action happening on screen. We understand that the team was trying to maintain the same image as the cult classic film, but a better music selection wouldn’t have destroyed that at all. In fact it may have even added more thrill to the game.

On a positive note we did enjoy the dialogue which was very transparent in its approach, cutting no corners when it came to each character expressing their emotions. Each character comes with their own perks which you of course must utilize effectively in the heists. When all things run smoothly, you can race to grab your extra packs of cash to help boost your overall heist reward. You can time-rewind and have one character focus on gathering the necessities while having the lead character take care of whatever threats come your way. Or you could just skip out on the extra perks and focus on killing anything that moves, which is a good thing since the game gives you the freedom to choose your own path. However it’s those issues we mentioned earlier that will have you reeling back in your chair, and your patience slowly starting to diminish. Sometimes we even ran into problems where, picking up weapons was an issue especially when various weapons lay directly on top of each other and you want to grab the best one to dispose of the incoming target. We ran into so many situations where instead of grabbing a machine gun to eliminate a group of cops, we picked up a bat and ended up getting popped simply because the game didn’t cooperate with us.

We imagine people who just don’t have the patience to be persistent and keep going will simply just give up and move on. Fortunately we did muster up the strength to shoot our way through each location and grab our loot, but man it was a tough hill to climb. Casual players may be turned off by the fact that you can’t choose a difficulty setting and you’re forced to deal with whatever comes your way. Another little thing that we realized is that there are a lack of weapons to choose from, which was unfortunate. It would’ve been cool to throw in some interesting tools and even extra actions like being able to roll to evade incoming attacks, these would really make Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days feel more enjoyable. Maybe that will come in a later patch who knows, but for now we’re left with a pretty sparse amount of tools to make our heists a little more thrilling.

Overall, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days does a great job of implementing a unique feature that we think fits the genre really well, but it just wasn’t executed in the best way possible. With poorly responsive AI, a lack of tools to utilize and other mentioned issues, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days just felt a little lacking. If you’re experienced at these types of games you could easily breeze through all 18 stages in under 10 hours, but for those who are just jumping in we’re not sure if they’d be even willing to go all the way through to the end.

Is Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days worth the purchase? Sure, if you enjoy games that test your ability to come up with strategic solutions to successfully clear heists. There’s enough action and replay value to keep you coming back, but it’s those plaguing issues that just need to adjusted. Maybe even throwing in some sort of local/online co-op mode at some point would be cool, but that’s entirely up to the team to see that through. Let us know what you think in the comments down below, and be sure to follow us on social media to stay updated about when Honey’s Gaming goes live with more games. Follow us on our Discord and let us know what other games you’d like us to stream in the near future! Until next time, this is NualphaJPN signing out.

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