After playing the entire game in a quick four to six hours and reading a myriad of forum posts of fans of the television series that are disappointed in its brevity, I can’t imagine it will do particularly well. Surely, the avid Sopranos collector with the full, boxed set of each season will own it regardless of its length, but I can’t imagine it breaking out into mainstream gamerdom.

The game itself is actually not bad from a pure gaming standpoint. It’s not terribly good either, but it was definitely playable and mildly enjoyable. The graphics are average, but you can definitely make out the characters from the show. The fact that they got the actual actors to do the voiceovers was a wise move since many other games fail to provide continuity in the conversion to video game. Even the Bada Bing strip club is represented faithfully with fully nude dancers (bitmapped nipples and all) that you can sit and watch in the game. Thoughtfully, the game developers give you the ability to pause and bring up a blank screen at any time even if you’re in the middle of a lap dance cinematic. The game is definitely rated MA – Mature Audiences for a reason.

The game plays third person style where the major focus is on melee combat. You run around the environment picking up objects and beating the brains out of anyone that doesn’t show the Soprano family the proper respect. You can perform combos or grapples and wrestle enemies to the ground. There are special moves and finishers that incorporate elements of the environment like filing cabinets or table saws that you can use to really devastate your enemies.

In spite of the apparent variety of attacks in the game, the melee combat can come as a little boring and repetitive. On top of that, there are often situations where more than one enemy jumps you and you get caught in an infinite combo that can be impossible to break out of. One guy clobbers you into a corner and stuns you then two more wallop you once or twice. They’ll wrestle you to the ground and pound on you until you break out of it, but then chances are once you’re up on of his buddies will grab you and start the whole process over again. It got to the point where all I could do was run away from them until I could find sledgehammer or pair of crutches to hit them from a distance. This wasn’t hard to do, but it did seem a little out of character to be running away all the time.

There’s really not much to complain about with the melee system, unlike the almost nonexistence of gunplay. There was a total of three times during the game where I actually drew my gun and it was never a fun experience. The interface was so kludgy, I couldn’t even figure out how to aim. It was actually unnecessary though because it auto-aimed at the center of the guy you were facing making aiming pointless.

Besides the combat engine, it’s actually a lot of fun running around as Joey LaRocca bustin’ heads and whackin’ wise guys. Whenever you get into a conflict with someone where you have dialog you can stay neutral, smooth talk them or act like a tough guy and try to intimidate them. Your choices affect how people react to you and whether or not you end up in a fistfight. You collect cash that you use to unlock concept art in the game, but other than that there’s nothing interesting or interactive about the world except the people in it. You don’t have any kind of inventory to speak of and anything you pick up while in a fight gets discarded immediately afterward.

The game really is very simple. Perhaps it’s too simple for the majority of Soprano fans. It’s definitely too simple for the serious gamer. The story may be worth something if you are a Sopranos fan, but my guess is that it falls well short of the standards of the award winning television series. It has the look and feel of the Sopranos, but is decidedly lacking in plot depth. It feels like more could have been put into this game story-wise, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the game was not received well by Sopranos fans.