Sopranos: Road to Respect

The Sopranos license seems to be a sinking ship lately. The show has gone very much downhill the past few seasons. And then this game is produced, hoping to appeal and make a little bit more money of of the following still left, before the final episodes of the series air later this year.

In the Sopranos: Road to Respect, you are Joey LaRocca, the son of the late Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero. The opening cut-scene shows you breaking into a car and stealing a purse. You run down the street looking like you are home free when Tony Soprano trips you and brings you in to talk. After yelling at you for your actions, he says that he will help you out and put you to work and have a chance to work your way up. This is where the game begins.

Your first mission, like most of the missions in the game, is to beat someone up. In this case, the unlucky man is a patron of Tony’s strip club, the Bada Bing. He apparently wasn’t treating one of the dancers properly and needed to be taken care of. While walking around beating people up seems like it would be fun, in Road to Respect, it is basically all you do, which quickly becomes repetitive and dull. Even the controls to fight aren’t very well done. There is a button for “quick attack,” which is the button that you will find yourself using the most when in combat. When you aren’t fighting you can steal things like drugs, wallets, cell phones and money, but even that is pointless because you can’t really do anything with the money in the game other than buy a lap dance.

It was great to see the actors from the show, providing the voices for their respective characters. The cut scenes are also pretty well done and include a number of funny one-liners. However, that’s about it for positives in the game. Overall, the game isn’t very well made. The graphics aren’t that great and have a number of glitches in them, (in one instance I was able to completely walk right through a table) and as mentioned before the game gets old very quickly. This game is really only worth trying if you are a die-hard Sopranos fan, and even after that one go-around should fade you away from it pretty quickly. Mafia games seem to be a current trend lately, with The Godfather and Scarface also recently being released. You might be better off trying out one of those titles if you want to break into this genre.