The Sopranos - Road to Respect is a Grand Theft Auto style game where you work your way up through the mob family, mission by mission. There is great voice acting - but less great gameplay.

First off, you need to be prepared for how short this game is. I've played games where the cinematics alone took up multiple hours, and to be honest with this game being based on a multi-year fantastic award winning series, with awesome actors, I was expecting that here too. However, the dialogue is often very trite, and there isn't nearly enough of it.

You are not one of the main characters from the show - instead you are an up and coming punk, a bastard child of Big Pussy. You are of course given silly little tasks at first, but as you prove your worth, they give you more and more challenging things to do. Often you're roaming around classic locations from the show.

Here's the problem. You would think with such a wealth of material to work from, and such fantastically complex, intricate plots, that they could easily pull off a multi-hour game. Sadly, that is not the case. Instead, you get a pretty straightforward series of activities that could come from pretty much any clone game.

The graphics are not stellar, either. The PS2 has been out for enough years that some rather impressive graphics have been created for it. There were numerous issues with The Sopranos that, really, a game with this kind of backing should not have displayed.

I do adore the Sopranos and admit it was fun to romp around in the Sopranos world. So let's take it for granted that some sort of game in the Sopranos WOULD be made, and that it would involve the cast members. That is never really a question here. The question is whether that world is a quality done world. I'm afraid the answer is - not really.

Certainly, if you adore the Sopranos, rent this game to see what it's all about. You'll probably get through it long before the rental period is up, and only have spent a few dollars. If you find that you adore talking to "real voice characters" over and over again enough to own it, you can always buy yourself a copy at that point.

Rating: 2/5