The Godfather 2 Review
Sir Your Cement Shoes Are Ready…

It was the film series that started it all, so really it was only a matter of time before it made the leap from film to video game. Sadly, EA’s first entry in the Godfather series was a lacklustre imitation of Grand Theft Auto, a series that parodied Mario Puzo’s epic as much as it emulated it.

With the second entry in the series, EA hope to rectify the situation and restore some honour to the Corleone family name. To a certain extent, introducing some new elements to the sandbox genre but still falls short of the highs that EA have achieved in the last six months.

The story starts with all the major crime families moving in together in a fragile alliance to take advantage of Cuba on the day of Castro’s revolution. Of course, as they mobsters celebrate what they think is a major victory, their ‘friends’ in government in Cuba are being supplanted by Fidel Castro and his supporters. All hell breaks loose and you have to make sure that Don Michael Corleone. In the escape, your boss and the head of Michael’s New York family is killed and you are promoted to fill his position. So begins your bid to become the ultimate Godfather.

In order to affect your rise to Godfather, you have to murder, coerce, cheat and steal your way across New York, Miami and Havana, removing any obstacle in your way. The main obstacles are the other crime families trying to make a living through the usual rackets like chop shops, drugs and firearms smuggling and prostitution and pornography.

There are a lot of sandbox games out there now and so, to distinguish the Godfather II from the madding crowd, EA have decided to introduce a little bit of strategy into the mix. You can apply the strategy in how you attack each opposing crime family. In order to achieve dominance you have to control all businesses in each of the three regions. Businesses are split into two types: fronts, stores that are used to launder money, and rackets, such as drug smuggling. Rackets comprise of several locations that operate the business. Control all of the locations and you control the racket. As well as earning you money, each racket also gives you a bonus such as armoured cars or bulletproof vests for you and your made men. Controlling fronts allows you to increase your income by a percentage for each front controlled.

In order to help you control the underworld you need made men who will help you run your criminal empire. You begin by choosing one made man and as your empire grows you will have the opportunity to recruit more. Each made man has special skills in useful areas like field medicine, arson, demolitions, safecracking, engineering and intimidation.

This is where the strategy comes in. Made men bolster your forces when you attack an enemy business. They allow you to sneak in through fences, crack safes, blow open doors and beat down opposing made men. They can also be sent to sabotage opponents businesses, which will deny them the bonus gained for that racket until the business is rebuilt. They can also defend your businesses when enemies attack them.

Of course your enemies have made men too and they have to be taken out in order to make it easier to take down their family headquarters. They only way to get at a made man is to do a favour for some of the locals in exchange for information about where your targets usually hang out and how to kill assassinate them. Each man requires a different assassination method like a sniper rifle headshot or being pushed off a roof. Once that is done correctly the made man is permanently dead and will not hamper your progress towards killing their don.

To take down an opposing family, you need to take overall their rackets and fronts to open up the ability to attack their headquarters. Destroy the headquarters and you have eliminated the family.

In theory, this allows you to wear down your opponent however you see fit and then swoop in for the kill. In practice this turns the game into a mission grinder where all the missions are essentially the same. There is the option to do favours for the locals for a bit of variety. Each favour will either earn you money or information on an enemy’s made man depending on the symbol that appears above the person’s head. Unfortunately there is not much variety in these missions either. They divide themselves up into beat-downs, hits or burglaries. Later on the burglaries result in you robbing your own businesses, which does jar a bit.

Graphically the game is a bit of a let down too. You and your made men are customisable from weapons to clothing but they do end up looking a bit bland. Whilst the visuals are very clean, there is no real distinctive style to the game and while it does dabble with comedy the looks don’t really reflect that. It feels like there was either a poorly implemented compromise between humour and realism or the writers and the level artists never actually spoke to each other. As a result the game suffers from a striking lack of visual identity.

The sound is also lacking in imagination. Where GTA III had invigorated the genre with entertaining DJs and well-chosen popular music, Godfather II relies on more generic period music that just blends into the background adding to the game’s overall air of banality.

It’s not all entirely doom and gloom though. There is one redeeming feature for all the sadistic gamers out there and that is the execution moves. Yes, for every weapon in the game you can kill your opponents in a sparklingly imaginative way. While your enemy is dazed and on his knees you can take the opportunity push your tommy gun down his throat and empty the magazine or redecorate the wall with their brains using your Magnum. Sadly the joy of this fades as soon as you discover that despite being able to pick up a great many of the game’s random objects and use them as melee weapons the execution moves remain pretty much the same.

Overall Godfather II is a great disappointment. The gameplay is initially enjoyable but as you progress deeper into the storyline the repetitive nature of the missions undermines any fun to be had. The banality of the experience also undermines the attempts to experiment with strategy. In the end of the day every family can be beaten by using the same, run in, guns blazing approach.

In the end the Godfather II ends up being more worthy of cement shoes than the criminal greatness it promises. Best bet is to save your money for the GTA IV downloadable content or even APB or Crackdown 2 if you have the patience.

Ewan Aiton 29 June 0