Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days is a time-warping good time

There's so much blood, man.

Big Star Games was kind enough to send over a demo of their upcoming top-down action shooter, Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days. Based on the classic Tarantino film, Bloody Days isn’t a shot for shot movie-to-game adaptation. Rather, it’s an homage to the characters and action of the film, with a clever time-warping mechanic that elevates it above normalcy into something worth playing. This is our Reservoir Dogs Bloody Days preview.

Our official review will come sometime around or after the 18th of May, but these first three levels of Reservoir Dogs give us a good intro to the rewinding strategic shooting found in Bloody Days. Each level is another heist or crime you and your colorful teammates are trying to pull off. The first one has Mr. Brown and Mr. White working together to clean out a local business and evade the police. Along the way, you’ll need to pick up guns, and maybe the occasional baseball bat, or you’ll be left with nothing but your fists to fend off law enforcement.

At first, you might be fooled into thinking this is just another top-down shooter. Something akin to Mr. Shifty, perhaps. But it’s so much more and becomes a complex strategic experience once you start to control multiple Dogs. Reservoir Dogs is a single player experience, but you’ll switch between dogs at certain points in the levels, to play through the same amount of time with each character in order to complete objectives.

How’s that work? Well in the first level, your leader is Mr. Brown, so he goes first and “creates time”. When he reaches his checkpoint or you press Space to rewind time, you shift control to Mr. White. Mr. White then has the amount of time Mr. Brown used to perform his actions and/or reach his checkpoint. If Mr. Brown took damage or even fell in the time he created, Mr. White could kill the enemy that took out Mr. Brown before he fell in gunfire. Make sense? It’s like having the ability with each successive character to alter the events of those before him.

It’s trippy, but also so brilliantly pulled off that it makes Bloody Days a unique shooter all in its own right. It doesn’t even need the Reservoir Dogs license, and frankly, I really hope the game comes to the Switch after playing it on Steam. It’s unique blend of action and strategic planning would suit the portable console really well.  There seems to be a wide selection of levels, scores to track, achievements to earn, and more in the final product, but our review will have to wait until we get the full copy later this coming week.

For now, enjoy the let’s play video from the devs above, explaining the mechanics of the time-bending better than I ever could.

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