Quentin Tarantino made a name for himself back in the early 1990s with the release of Reservoir Dogs, but the recently released Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days doesn't come close to reaching the same heights. It amounts to nothing more than a predictable twin-stick shooter that fails to live up to its own potential, let alone the film's, in any appreciable way.
There's no narrative to Bloody Days--no character development to create emotional resonance. The game at large isn't concerned with variety, either, sticking to the same rigid format from start to finish. You take control of reimagined versions of the film's six leads--Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Pink, Mr. Orange, and Mr. White--and head out on 18 heists. Each mission starts the same: There's some banter between the two primary characters (you have the option of selecting a third), they walk to a marked position, guns are pulled, and bullets fly as you attempt to shoot your way to a bounty of cash. Aside from differing locations, such as a bank, laundromat, or warehouse, all 18 levels follow this very strict, predictable formula. It doesn't take long for Bloody Days to fall into repetition, which is made worse when you're forced to replay sections of levels and rewatch unskippable cutscenes.
Just like the film, death will eventually come to the colorful criminals, but Bloody Days makes it too often of an occurrence in part due to frustrating controls. While keyboard-and-mouse controls offer greater accuracy than a controller, latency between keystrokes and character actions can cause baffling, unexpected deaths. The gamepad fares far worse: The button layout is awkward, with the shoot and sprint actions placed on the bumpers instead of the shoulders, which will trip you up on more than one occasion. While each method of play allows you to choose between preset control schemes, they don't save, meaning that if you select option B instead of option A and exit back to the game, you default back to option A. This illusion of choice is frustrating, especially considering the other gamepad layouts are more accessible than the default.
Bloody Days does offer an initially compelling mechanic: At the press of a button, you can rewind time and switch to one of your two partners in crime. The actions you performed before switching will occur in real time as you head back into battle, allowing you to set up thrilling shootouts and increase your combo count to earn more points at the end of the heist. While this is exhilarating at first, especially when you're blasting through waves of enemies with twice the firepower, there are times when enemies you encountered as the first character inexplicably change their path, essentially nullifying any amount of strategy you put into setting up your initial run.
Lamentably, enemy AI is shallow: It's all too easy to corner foes and either fill them with lead or bash their heads in with a melee weapon. Exploiting the enemy's predictability like this also overshadows the time-rewind mechanic, which ultimately proves to be more of a risky tool than a necessity. While it's necessary for the two primary characters you take into battle to reach a mission's end point, you can rely on just a single character to handle the dirty work. The one exception is when the game puts enemies offscreen who nonetheless send bullets flying your way. This creates a challenge, but it also elicits frustration, since you're left floundering to avoid getting hit while returning fire to targets you can't actually see.
Bloody Days' aesthetic is enticing, with bright colors and generous amounts of blood--an otherwise gruesome picture that works to emphasize the comedic carnage on display. It's a shame, then, that the game's performance will kill you more often than the bullets will. During the later levels, Bloody Days chugs along and, in most situations, freezes for a few moments. This inconsistency will get you killed, get one of your partners killed, or occasionally allow you to kill every enemy in your way.
Aside from the Reservoir Dogs name in the title and the colorfully named characters, Bloody Days shares almost nothing in common with its namesake. With its rewind mechanic, you can see the potential for an exhilarating top-down, twin-stick shooter, but this never comes to pass. The game is easily exploitable and produces frustration far too often to become even the slightest bit interesting. Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days devolves to a banal experience that's all bark and no bite.
After the fateful plane crash that kicks off The Fidelio Incident, the panicked wife of our protagonist begs him to find the pages of a diary lost after impact, exclaiming, "They can't find out who we are!" That statement ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy for a game that, outside of first-person exploration, seems confused about what it really wants to be.
In part, The Fidelio Incident is a loose, modern interpretation of the Beethoven opera referenced in its title: a heroic tale of a faithful wife disguising herself as a man to rescue her falsely imprisoned husband. It's certainly a narrative we don't see terribly often in games, but alas, the only strong ties back to the opera here are the names of our main characters--Leonore and Stanley (Florestan in the opera)--and one particular bit of backstory found halfway through the game.
But there's an even more unique narrative about the Northern Ireland Conflict afoot, using Stanley and Leonore's burgeoning relationship in the mid-1980s as an access point to explore what 30 years of ugly, small-scale warfare can do to a country and its populace. This aspect at least gets a bit more room to breathe in The Fidelio Incident, delivered as part of Leonore's scattered diary and Stanley's own hallucinatory flashbacks, but this, too, ends up a secondary concern.
Ultimately, all of this is really the window dressing for a graphically impressive but mechanically undercooked journey where Stanley seeks to rescue Leonore after their prop plane crashes and burns in a freezing, desolate area of Iceland. Leonore ends up trapped under the smoldering ruins on a mountaintop. Meanwhile, Stanley is stranded at the mountain's base and has to take the long way up, braving deadly sub-zero temperatures and looking for life-saving heat sources.
This ends up being the crux of the game: Stanley moving up the mountain, on foot, while trying to stay warm. It's a "struggle" that turns out to be conveniently easy; the plane crash has strewn fiery debris across the entire area, steam geysers are rampant, and a seemingly abandoned scientific research facility still has enough working mechanisms to let Stanley turn up the heat with the twist of a valve.
The turning of valves ends up being the core gameplay mechanic, supporting the rudimentary puzzles that dominate The Fidelio Incident's brief playtime. For example, turning a newfound valve will create a new heat source, which will lead you to the next checkpoint. Lacking in real challenge, the valve-based puzzles are an unimaginative substitute for any number of other survival tactics that could've been employed--although, ironically, every attempt made to momentarily shake things up also falls flat. One of the game's scant attempts to introduce variety to the formula is a puzzle involving a hailstorm that's unrealistically localized to a small area of the mountain, an odd choice that forcefully breaks your immersion in the otherwise natural and believable setting.
The fact that much of the game's story is delivered via diary pages--pages that so conveniently happened to fall unscathed next to scattered pieces of burning debris--feels similarly contrived, but the tale told within those diary pages tends to be when the game springs to life. Leonore's rapturous Irish lilt tells a tale of young love and attraction that, thanks to political and familial strife and one major, playable shocker of a criminal act, turns elegiac and regretful leading up to the present day. The Stanley and Leonore stranded on the mountain are middle-aged adults at the stage of their relationship where they're together because they don't know how to be with anyone else.
Their identities are further reinforced by strong vocal performances from Glenn Keogh and Bess Harrison. Stanley states the obvious with the fierce, all-encompassing realization of what he stands to lose if he can't locate his wife. And Leonore, hot-blooded and larger than life in the pages of the diary, is now tiny and frightened coming over Stanley's radio. The activities you engage in may be lacking, but the motivation to get through them is strong thanks to the sheer force of emotion.
Still, The Fidelio Incident being nice to look at and listen to doesn't necessarily make it interesting to play. The haunting, frozen vistas and enthralling backstory constantly trip over uninspired gameplay. Though there's a measure of forgiveness to be had considering the length of the experience, even that concession is fragile in light of the obvious disparity that exists in the quality of the narrative and the gameplay that's forced upon it.
Telltale's Guardians of the Galaxy series slows down with Episode 2. After an action-packed first episode, the second's slower pace leaves room for more substantial character moments. On occasion, however, that space is filled with manufactured drama, as key decisions revolve around playing favorites with the Guardians in a way that comes off as petty high school drama instead of the culmination of natural tension among the group. Fortunately, there's enough mystery in the story to carry the episode through to its to-be-continued ending, drama and all.
Most of the episode consists of point-and-click exploration and conversations with less of a focus on Telltale-style quick-time events. Compared to the cinematic first episode, in which the game-y elements felt like interruptions, this episode flows a lot better, albeit more slowly. The few quick-time sequences that are present don't feel like the game is checking in to make sure you're paying attention, and it flows between conversations and exploration well.
The Guardians are left reeling after the events of the first episode. Their next step is to learn more about the Eternity Forge, a relic in their possession that has the power to resurrect the dead. It's a strange enough artifact to drive the story forward without much action--it gave Peter visions of his long-dead mother, and he's not the only one who has someone they'd want to bring back to life. The first big decision involves either hunting down Gamora's highly dangerous sister, Nebula, so she can translate runes on the Eternity Forge, or going on a side mission with Rocket to see if he can bring back someone he's lost.
It's the only decision in the episode that's at all difficult. I repeatedly sided with Gamora in the first episode and chose to go with Rocket in the second, even though Nebula was definitely going to do a bit of murdering before we could catch up to her. Gamora's disapproving gaze is very cutting, but Rocket's story is worth exploring and makes him a much more sympathetic character than in the previous episode. (It also involves an adorable anthropomorphic otter.)
After that, though, the episode relies heavily on easy-to-avoid drama to fill the gaps between points of interest. I ended up siding with Gamora about something later, which upset Drax, since I'd picked Gamora over him before--but since Drax mostly just supplies comedic relief and promises to fight his way through any problem, going with the level-headed Gamora is an obvious choice, especially when it involves her sister. Talking to a mopey Drax is kind of like dealing with a five-year-old and doesn't make for the most interesting conversations, either.
That said, I was more curious about the mysteries of the Eternity Forge and my companions' backstories this time around than I was with the first instalment--even though the drama often feels forced, there's substance to each character that's given a chance to shine this episode. The prospect of resurrection gives everyone an opportunity to show more emotion, and Gamora and Nebula's conversation in particular is both important and interesting to participate in.
Even though the drama often feels forced, there's substance to each character that's given a chance to shine this episode.
Small technical hiccups break up the flow, though. The facial animations are inconsistent and don't always sync neatly with dialogue, and I had to restart a sequence because an important prompt never appeared and stopped progression. It's less an issue of performance than polish, but it interrupts the already slow pace of the episode.
By the ending cliffhanger, Guardians creates enough of a mystery with the Eternity Forge--specifically the process and cost of using it--to segue into the next episode. Emotions run high, and that works well for Rocket's story as well as the conflict between Gamora and Nebula, but other pivotal choices seem like overblown drama between kids instead of a ragtag band of heroes. It lacks action and big reveals, but it sets up a lot of different avenues to potentially explore down the line.
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