Made Man: Confessions of the Family Blood

Rating ESRB: Adults Only Genre action Publisher Aspyr External Links Official Made Man Website

Welcome to Made Man for the PS2, also available on the PC. In this game you take on the roll of Joey Verola, a Vietnam veteran climbing the ladder in the mythical New York mob, whom I respect as the elite business men that they are! The game opens to Joey telling his life story to a fellow "businessman." As he tells stories such as his trip for North Carolina to New York smuggling cigarettes across state lines (oh yeah that's right, rebel to the max!), the player gets to take control of the story at certain points.

The problem is that once you take on the roll, you wish that you could get back to the story and stay there. The problem I could see right away was that this game was planned for PC first. The controls are dual analog stick based, controlling movement with left analog and aiming with right. So imagine WASD for movement and Mouse for aiming. Here's where your problem comes in: the control sensitivity is outrageous! Aiming becomes easier over time, but when you have hillbillies and FBI agents shooting at you with shotguns and automatic rifles you really don't have time to learn to aim.

Graphically the game is much like GTA 3, character wise, but the environments are lacking. You can pretty much shoot anything except the walls but you'll have more fun trying to stay alive while fumbling with your crosshair.

Most of Joey's enemies all suffer from extreme stupidity. They will unload a clip into a doorway while you stand there then while reloading you can pop out and shoot them in the face. Every once and awhile you'll see an enemy do something which indicates they have a slight sense of self-preservation. They'll duck behind cover, rarely, but then you pop up and they pop right back up in the same spot getting a bullet to the head. One nice feature is that you are able to put your back against a wall and fire around corners. And, of course, there is the famous, and extremely unnecessary, Bullet Time motion.

And now to my least favorite part of the game. Ladies and Gentlemen, I'll admit it; I watch a lot of television, mainly cartoons on Adult Swim. Voice acting is an important thing to me, especially in a video game. With cheesy lines like "Go to hell Verola", and equally witty retorts such as "F$@# you! *BLAM*, you wonder if they just grabbed writers off of the streets and said, "Here's a pen and paper, write a mobster story."

Made Man is pretty much the example of why extreme profanity, while funny, does not make a game. You have to have some kind of gripping story and fun gameplay. But it seemed they spent more time looking for more places to drop the f-bomb in then teaching the enemies to dodge, duck, dip dive, and dodge.

That's right, it's a Dodge Ball reference.