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If you’ve ever glamorized the life of either a game reviewer or a mobster, feel free to run out and buy The Sopranos: The Road to Respect on the PlayStation 2. The rather ironically titled game is the latest in a long line of Grand Theft Auto wannabes, and will almost certainly go down as a footnote in gaming history for being one of the worst imitators. Like the equally as lame Reservoir Dogs game, The Sopranos: The Road to Respect proves that some franchises shouldn’t make the leap to the virtual world.

Family Business

Based on HBO’s hit series The Sopranos, the videogame lets you interact with the strip-club based world of the Soprano family. As Joey LaRocca, you’re everyone’s errand boy—doing everything from shaking down businesses, whacking the competition, and dumping bodies, to gambling, taking sandwich orders, and finding hookers. Yes, this game is all about family, and doing all the things families do together… if you’re part of the Manson family, or an exceedingly clichéd TV mob gang.

As expected, The Sopranos: The Road to Respect is rated Mature, and THQ must have thought that between the fan base of the show and the inclusion of gratuitous violence, profanity, and bimbos, they’d have a sure fire hit. Unfortunately, gangster dialogue and “live” nude girls can’t replace actual gameplay and this is where the The Sopranos: The Road to Respect comes up short.

Gang Violence

No matter what your actual task is, most of the game boils down to simplistically brutal bashing. The game makes an effort to provide an interesting, Soprano-like combat experience with the use of location-based special moves, like bashing a guy’s head into a toilet or file cabinet, or slamming him repeatedly into a door jam—but the controls are clumsy and unresponsive, and the constant cues giving direction just get annoying.

The whole game feels like a series of pointless battles against stupid goons for no real reason. You can choose to be a “smooth” or tough in conversation, which can alter dialogue outcomes somewhat, but none of the events make much sense. There’s almost no variety in the gameplay—the family has a problem with some one or another, you go over to talk and end up “taking care” of them and all their conveniently nearby friends.

Show Some Respect

If you use a gun in public, you’ll lose respect, yet bashing a guy’s brains in with anything else in a populated casino or hotel room is perfectly fine. Lose enough respect and you get whacked, but to gain it back, you just give your mob bosses a tribute (as in, cash) and you’re golden again. It’s hard to take the game seriously when you play a character that is so stupid and immoral that he deserves to die. But the AI is so bad that the fights aren’t difficult, even with the lame controls.

Fans of the series will recognize some of the locations and most of the characters, but that’s not enough to recommend it. Starting in the Bada Bing strip club (and usually ending up there after each mission) the game has plenty of lurid content, including letting you watch the strippers perform from a variety of angles. Beyond desperate teenage boys with no access to the Internet, however, it’s hard to imagine anyone finding poorly rendered polygonal women appealing.

The presentation matches the rest of the game—it’s terrible. The mediocre voice acting uses stupid dialogue, and the graphics are bad even by the middling standards of Grand Theft Auto-visuals. What’s worse is that the frame rate is mysteriously choppy as well.

Swim with the fishes

Even if you don’t find all the vulgar, absurd, and criminal stereotypes of Italian-Americans in the Sopranos offensive, the number of brain cells you’ll lose due to the idiotic gameplay, terrible graphics, and headache-inducing frame rate is enough to enrage anyone. There’s enough depth and history to the show to make a game that could do it justice, but The Sopranos: The Road to Respect is definitely not it.

Article by: Jason D'Aprile
Video produced by: Michael Benson