The melee combat makes up the bulk of the gameplay in Road to Respect, but you can also use weapons. There are items such as crowbars, baseball bats, and bottles that you can pick up and swing at your enemies. These items are usually worth using because they will cut down on the number of hits required to put down an enemy, but they still suffer from the same collision detection issues as the standard melee combat. You do get a gun in the game, but you rarely get a chance to use it. If you fire a gun in a public area you'll lose respect, and if your respect gets too low you'll get whacked. That's the only effect the whole respect meter has on the game, though, which makes it feel like a half-baked game mechanic that you'll probably forget about completely. When you do get to shoot your gun, you'll find it completely useless and unsatisfying. You can lock on to enemies by holding the L1 button and fire with the R1 button. There's only one gun in the game, though, and it's not very accurate. It usually takes half a dozen shots to finish off an enemy, so it's quicker to just pick up the nearest blunt object and brain him real quick. If you're on the other end of the barrel you won't find the gunplay any more exciting or intense. You can stand there as an enemy unloads on you from point-blank range and you'll barely even notice it. Stranger yet, the enemies won't fire until you're right up next to them, and even then they take several seconds to fire between shots, despite using semiautomatic pistols.
Other than constantly fighting, there is very little to do in this game. You can collect loot such as cell phones, drugs, and wallets, but there's no reason to do so because the money in the game is pointless. There are only a few things to spend money on, such as lap dances and offerings to the bosses, and none of those things have any impact on the game. There is a clunky and cumbersome game of Texas Hold 'Em included here, but the interface is so terrible that you'll have a hard time playing for more than a few hands.
You can play some Texas Hold 'Em with Tony Soprano, but you really, really shouldn't.
The presentation in Road to Respect is sloppy. The character models are blocky and ugly, and the animation is horribly stiff and awkward. There are also severe clipping problems, so you'll constantly see characters pass completely through solid objects. There are only about half a dozen stages in the game, and none of them look very good. There's the small, empty Bada Bing! strip club that inexplicably has you waiting as the game loads when you move from one tiny area to another. There's a gym, a warehouse, a hospital, and a few other generic locations that are basically just one long hallway for you to run from one end of to the other. The sound is actually fairly well done. All of the cast members from the television show provide the voices of their respective characters in the game, and most of them sound good. The generic characters sound terrible, though, and the dialogue is full of awful lines that are mostly poorly hacked-together strings of various forms of the F-word. Other than the familiar theme song that plays over the title screen, the music is forgettable--you'll hear the same handful of songs repeated in different stages throughout the game.
It will take you less than eight hours to play through The Sopranos: Road to Respect, and in that time you might die once or twice. The game is very linear, repetitive, and easy, which means it isn't at all fun to play. To make matters worse, the game is ugly, clunky, and full of bugs and glitches. Even if you're a devout fan of the show, there's absolutely no reason to play this game.
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Where to buy
The Sopranos: Road to Respect (PlayStation 2):
$14.79
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Amazon.com
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$14.79 | Yes |
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