Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days

The cleverness of this action game hinges upon its time-rewind mechanic, which gets bogged down and hampered by repetitive gameplay. Considering how many seeming strikes against Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days and arched eyebrows it invites based solely on the fact it exists (games based on movies are usually not good, and there was another unfavorably received Reservoir Dogs game in 2006), it's surprising how surprisingly workable and fun this title is. Which, to be clear, isn't a knock against the game. It's a serviceable action title, the likes of which you have seen before: From a top-down perspective, you run and gun as up to six different characters.

What makes the game unusual, and a deceptively brainier game than it might seem, is time rewinds after your turn with one gunman is over and you then take control of another. A color-coded visualization of the path you took in previous turns remains onscreen, allowing you to improvise and collaborate with yourself in other turns. This can be life-saving for some of your characters, or wind up costing you your life on a later turn. This gets thornier, trickier, and devilishly more complicated. Unfortunately, the first several missions will bog you down in repetitiveness to make sure you understand how to play around with time, and when there's only 18 levels, cutting down on the diversity of experiences is a bit of a disappointment.