I was a late comer to the whole Sopranos obsession. I have always enjoyed movies like Goodfellas, the Godfather series, Scarface, all of those. The best mob/gangland movie I’ve seen lately was The Departed, with Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio, and the rest.

I got my first taste of the Sopranos from a friend in Vegas when I lived there, and fell right in love with the show, albeit at the very end of the fifth season. I watched the sixth season of the Sopranos in its entirety.
So, when I heard there was a video game coming out for the PS2 entitled “The Sopranos: Road to Respect” I was psyched. So, as soon as there was a copy available over at Blockbuster Video, I snapped it up, brought it home, and started fantasizing about all the cool and nifty things they would do with a game based on an award winning HBO series.

I really should have known better. TV Series games, most movie games, they just kind of.. well… they suck. Sopranos was an exception to the rule because it sucked more. I’ll explain.

In Sopranos: RTR, you play Joey LaRocca, son of the notorious rat “Big Pussy” LaRocca (the guy they shot and threw off the back of a boat a season or two ago, I never saw that episode.) In the opening scene, we see Joey smash a car window and steal an old woman’s purse, and Tony Soprano knocks him over and drags him into the pork store to give him a good talking to, then offers him some work.

From there, you go on missions to do various things, one of the first of which is to dump a body in the harbor (after slamming his head into a urinal and accidentally killing him, of course.). The plot lines are egregious and over the top, but that’s a mob movie/show/game all over, so that’s not only acceptable, but a good thing.

The dialog interface allows you to choose three different versions of saying the same thing in a conversation. You can select “Tough”, “Neutral”, and “Smooth”. This could have been a very cool feature, except for the fact that you have until the other person in the conversation is done speaking to choose your response type, or Neutral is automatically selected. This is prohibitively annoying, because as any RPG player knows, sometimes you need to think about your actions in a game to get the most out of them, and this game forces you to rush through the process and really detracts from the experience.

The actual game play when you’re not watching cut-scenes (which are the best part of this travesty of a game) is composed mostly of punching people in various ways to intimidate them or knock them cold. There are no puzzles, your role-playing in your responses doesn’t seem to affect much, and all you do is beat people up through various stages that are so linear you absolutely can not go the wrong way, ever.

And for a game entirely composed of third-person combat, the combat system sucks like a hoover with a hyperdrive. The controls are awkward, and more often than not the opponents just grab you and force you to the ground. I found the best way to win a fight with more than one opponent was to let them get me down on the ground, push the square button until I rolled them over and punch them into unconsciousness. If more than one opponent is on you at a time standing up, they just pummel you into oblivion. You’re dazed after taking a hit, and the other guys beats you up, dazing you some more, then the first guy goes at it again…. and so on.

You can pick up various weapons and use the environment to your advantage, which was the only cool thing about the combat system. Everything from a filing cabinet (slamming their head in it repeatedly), to a table saw is hanging around in various stages, just waiting to be used to disable or kill your opponents.

When you’re not fighting, you’re wandering around looking for loot to pick up off desks, tables, magazine stands, and the like. Each piece of loot you pick up adds some money to your character’s balance, but the only thing you can buy in the game is tributes for Paulie, your captain in the game. You can pay a tribute to Paulie to refill your respect meter, which appears to go down for no reason whatsoever.

The respect system. Ah, how I expected something more. I expected something a little more akin to BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic series, where you can affect your destiny and character by the choices you make in the game. Not a chance in this one, you’re responses aren’t really yours to choose, and they don’t affect the outcome of the game unless you lose enough respect to get whacked.

I got whacked once in the game, when I shot someone at a bachelor party because I was tired of the combat system and just wanted to end the fight. Immediately, without warning, a cut scene started with my character begging not to get it in the eyes and being blown off the back of a boat by Tony and Paulie a la Big Pussy’s fate. No warning, no anything except an immediate cut scene and game over.
I stuck with it, hoping against hope it would get better, and then about four hours into the game play, it was over. I had beaten the game after a long mission on the docks to kill a rival gang. Suddenly your character is a made man, the game is over, and you’re left with this sinking feeling that there are still six days left to the rental, and the game has all the replay value of pong.

There were some good things, too. They used the cast from the Sopranos for the voices, and they did a great job of making the dialog you hear fun and profane as all get-out. I haven’t heard the F-word that much in anything except the original series, ever. Definitely, definitely definitely not a game to have anyone under 18 in the room with you while you’re playing.

With the short playing time, the absolutely horrible combat system, and the half-assed attempt at RPG elements, this game is really one of the worst I have played since Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith for the PS2.

Rent it if you must indulge your obsession with the Sopranos, but don’t expect much, and definitely do not buy it.

If I was giving out stars, this game would get a 1 star rating, and even then only because the plot was fun to listen to, and I love hearing James Gandolfini talk.
~A!