It used to be that movie-based games would come out about the same time as the films they were based on, sink or swim, and disappear from our minds. For some movies, no games would come out, which, considering how bad these games used to be, was a good thing. (In other instances, such as with Stallone's racing masterpiece Driven and its attendant games, gamers lost. Hard.) Recently, however, an alarming new trend has game makers mining cinematic history for easy game fodder, and so far the quality of the results hasn't held a candle to that of the original films.

The latest classic film to be thus "honored" is Quentin Tarantino's 1992 gangster drama Reservoir Dogs. It took 14 years, but now we've got the game to go with it. Unfortunately, in almost every way that the movie was tense, funny and exciting, the game is simple, boring and contrived.

The game's basic outline follows the plot of the film, or rather the plot behind the film, since most of the actual movie was dialogue in a warehouse. The game invites you to experience the aftermath of the botched diamond heist from each of the criminals' perspectives, taking you through the frantic shootouts and high-speed getaways that were only alluded to in the movie. It's about as good an idea for a Reservoir Dogs game as can be had, but the reality falls short of the concept thanks to the double whammy of underdeveloped, paper-thin gameplay mechanics and the noticeable lack of Tarantino's razor-sharp scripting.


The Banality of Evil

Most of the levels take place on foot, with you playing one of the criminals as they try to escape from a public location. You can choose to be a psychopath by shooting everyone in sight, or you can take a more "professional" approach by avoiding bloodshed through intimidation. In reality, the game designers want you to take the second route, and the quality of the ending depends on how respectably you've behaved throughout the game.

The problem is that neither the shooting nor the hostage-taking mechanics are very interesting. The shooting action is akin to that of a second-rate GTA clone, and there's no real reason to engage in it outside of panic. Meanwhile, the hostage antics are vaguely creative yet thoroughly boring. I got the basic strategy down in the first ten minutes, and was able to breeze through the rest of the game, disabling every cop I ran into, with the exact same methodology. If crime is really this easy then I'm in the wrong line of work.