I’m currently going through the Sopranos right now as a way to finally see where “the golden age” of TV started and man oh man this show is such a treat. All of the actors are given amazing material to work off of and the actors themselves are just fantastic. I can’t imagine a Tony Soprano without James Gandolfini or Christopher Moltisanti without Michael Imperioli. It’s one of those rare shows like Better Call Saul where everyone behind the screen and in front are giving nearly 110 percent at all times and it just keeps getting better and better as the show goes on. So because the show was so stupidly popular for HBO they decided the best way to capitalize on the show’s success is to partner with THQ and get some sketchy fly by night game studio to hack out a Sopranos video game without the creators involvement and none of the aspects that make the show good in the first place. Yeah this sounds like a great idea.

For starters instead of jumping on the crime sandbox bandwagon like Scarface of Godfather instead it’s a third person beat em up game. Which I guess makes sense since by a technicality there is indeed a lot of fighting in the show. But the show isn’t really focused on violence that much as you’d honestly think if you just played this game. Don’t get me wrong the show uses violence but normally when it necessary for the sake of tone, here it’s used in such an uncomfortably gratuitous way it almost feels like the writers for the game had never watched the show before and just assumed it was like any other mob show, when in actuality the show is much more focused on the family life of Tony and not so much the mafia. The gameplay is probably some of the worst beat em up gameplay I’ve ever played. Where in a normal beat em up game where enemies take their sweet ass time and fight you one at a time, here they bum rush you seemingly at once to where you can’t get any sort of attacks in at all, best of all there are no I frames in this so you can’t just rely on having a short time to get any combos in; just be as aggressive as the bots and don’t bother thinking. Oh yeah and those combos; yeah don’t bother with them. The combat is super sluggish and unresponsive at times to the point where trying to do combos actually got me killed more often than just spamming the same basic combo over and over again. You also have a grab move but it barely works most of the time and by the time you can actually grab an enemy they’ll already be dead so there's no point in even doing it. By the halfway point you’ll unlock better grab moves that kill enemies in one hit by doing a QTE and once you have that the game becomes a cakewalk, I have no idea why they’d even keep these grab QTEs in the game other then seeing your character snap a dude arm in half like it was a stick because “violence is rad” or something like that. The whole gameplay system just feels so slapdash together, there's even a choice base system where during some conversations you can choose to either be nice or an asshole, I have no idea why this system is in the game because it doesn't seem like the different choices matter other then “do you wanna fight this person or not” so for most of the game I was the nicest mafioso the north jersey mob had ever seen. So yeah the gameplay sucks and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever but that’s not what really matters, what matters most is the story since this is a Sopranos game; so how's the story?

This game takes place in between seasons 5 and 6 so for the sake of not spoiling anything for people who wanna watch the show but don’t want a borderline shovelware game to spoil a 25 year old show I’ll be putting up a spoiler warning and for anything that might spoil characters names I’ll be slapping a 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 for names. Still you have been warned.

The game takes place sometime after season 5 where you play as Joey LaRocca who’s is a illegitimate son of 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃. Tony sees Joey doing petty small level crimes and gets insulted thinking that he’s wasting the life that 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 gave him. But since Tony and 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 were such good friends he gives Joey a spot in Paulie’s crew. Sometimes for weird story reasons Joey will see 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 in reflections as a kinda ghost but it’s never really explained and I’m assuming the only reason their even in the game was to mimic the weird dream sequences the show had; or it was so they could bring back 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 to reprise his role as 𝐑𝐄𝐃𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 for fan service and nothing else because his character serves zero purpose to the overall story. Now I could go beat for beat to every plot point but I’m not because the story itself is paper thin, it’s pretty much just a rising the ranks gangster story with locations and characters from the show slapped in almost as window dressing. As a fan of the show it is really cool being able to explore the Bada Bing and Vesuvio's and having some of the show's actors reprise their role is fun; but then they start talking and it just goes downhill from there. Voice acting is a form of acting in of itself, so trying to get normal actors who have no experience with the style of acting normally leads to a very unfortunate outcome. None of the actors sound like their giving it their a game besides James Gandolfini and Tony Sirico and even then they can’t seem to get the same vocal inflections for their character so they all come off as flat and tired sounding at all times, Robert Iler who plays AJ is trying the least out of all the returning actors but knowing him that’s not a surprise at all. The actual writing of the game is honestly god awful and somehow turned around to becoming one of the most immature video games I’ve ever played. Within the first 30 minutes of starting up the game you get a fully clothed lap dance from a stripper after beating up the DJ at the strip club because he was playing music she didn’t like, or how about later in the game where you need to blow up a porno studio and in doing so you start beating people up with fleshlights and dildos. It feels like the game was written by a 12 year old who really wants to be perceived as grown up so they just have a whole bunch of grown up stuff crammed into it to have the perception of maturity but just come off as trashy. Nowhere else is that best established then the last mission
(content warning: sexual assault) So after Tony sent you to blow up a porno studio as payback for a newyork capo doublecrossing him he then seeks up revenge on Joey but trying to send him a message. That message then ends up being him and his brother kidnapping Joeys then girlfriend, viciously beating and raping her as a way to drew him out.
Not only is this just the most tasteless way of sparking a third act but just the mere thought using sexual assault ub the way you used it is goes beyond just being trashing and just completely disgust me to no end. Unless you feel like you can confidently approach that subject in a realistic and mature manner you could do something thoughtfully intelligent with it; what you shouldn’t be using it for shock value and having the thinly veiled veneer of having that same prestige television writing the show had. Fucking shame on you.

This game is a disgusting stain on this show’s legacy and it genuinely upsets me that something like this could even get past HBO’s quality assurance test. This is one of those very rare cases where I find literally zero good qualities about a game, it’s just one of those games where it’s rotten right down to the bone and one of the VERY few times I actively regret playing it. The nicest thing I could say about it was it was only 3 hours long so it’s not like I was wasting a lot of time. Don’t play this game, honestly it’s not worth it and I regret even giving this game the time of day.

I like The Sopranos show a lot, so I thought I’d like the game as well, but that’s not what happened. Pretty disappointing.

The story was fine (But maybe a little too over the top sometimes), the cast was awesome and it was so cool they got the cast from the show to do this, and the in-game graphics were ok too (Remind of Godfather and Scarface actually), but my, oh my, the gameplay sucks. The combat in the game is really bad and I didn’t know what I was doing most of the time. This game also gets repetitive a lot of the time because Joey is usually just talking from person to person, so I got tired of it pretty quickly and eventually just quit for the day. I know the Sopranos isn’t like Godfather or Scarface where you rule with force, but it’s just not fun to play like this. Accurate, but boring. I hate how the mouth moments don’t match the words in the in-game cutscenes as it always takes me out of the experience. I also don’t like the idea of playing as Puss’ illegitimate son, it just feels thrown in there.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed with this game. Again, I think the show is amazing, but this game was just bad.