To hit the approximately two-hour run time, many films will omit certain elements. Whether this is for dramatic effect, allowing our imaginations to craft more extravagant scenarios based on inference, or whether it is down to time and resources, something’s got to give, even if it sounds spectacular. In 2006, 14 years after its debut, fans could play through and experience the missing chapters of Reservoir Dogs.

Filling in the gaps after the coffee shop and before the warehouse scenes that make up the film. You play as the ill-fated band of jewel thieves, as they try to make their way from the robbery to the warehouse where the majority of the film’s action takes place. Whether keeping a cool, steady hand or leaving a pile of bodies in their wake is up to the player. Dealing with 15 levels involving high-speed car chases and hectic shoutouts that were only hinted at in the film.

The game boasts two distinct types of gameplay over its 15 chapters. Driving and, for lack of a better term, shooting sections. Driving involves getting your car from point A to point B intact, avoiding the cops and obstacles, like the other commuters on the L.A. freeway. Shooting will feel more familiar to anyone who’s played a third-person shooter. The game introduces the option to take a human shield, which makes moving slower, and gives you a tense stand-off with the law enforcement. Reservoir Dogs is judging you, if you gun down innocents with nary a care, the game will brand you a “Stone Cold Psycho”, which might not mean much to you at the moment. Especially as this will fill up the adrenalin meter, allowing you to use special moves and even slow motion. This will ultimately come back in what ending you get, making Reservoir Dogs a prototype for those oh-so popular Morality Choice systems that games would embrace a few years later.

Being a licensed game, Reservoir Dogs tries its best to evoke the feeling of the film. As mentioned before, the majority of that film’s action takes place in a warehouse, where deception and double-crossing are on the menu, which might be an interesting opposition. The fictional station featured in the film is here, as the soundtrack of Reservoir Dogs is almost as iconic as the suits and the colour-based code names. So you have the car radio, blaring the 70s hits that the film, speeding along to Steelers Wheels is an experience. While the star-studded cast was probably busy working on other projects to return to voice the video-game selves, Michael Madsen does lend his vocal talents, and it is always great when he returns to projects like Species 2.

While you might have some reservations about adapting an essentially single-scene movie into an action video game so many years after it was released. Reservoir Dogs does make for a pseudo-tie-in game that aims to please. Much like Beverly Hills Cop, however, it feels like another entry in the wild love affair between the 6th generation of consoles and adapting classic films and T.V. franchises. In a world with quick film tie-ins and games that take a premise and run with it, here we are, stuck in the middle.

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