The Godfather

"Pretty good for a movie game, but not great"

My Review for the Godfather Game
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Hey, a movie-based game! What a good idea! Fortunately, for a game based on one of the most beloved moves of all time, the game stays fairly true to the story, and look and feel of the movie. They even got Marlon Brando and a lot of the other original cast to do VA's, which is pretty sweet.

Sadly, while doing justice to a great movie, The Godfather is by far not a great game. Let's break it down...

GAMEPLAY (5/10)
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The very most important part of a game, the GAMEPLAY. The game play is simple, you run around, beat people up, shoot people, drive and crash cars, etc. Basically, if GTA made a ame in the '40s it would be sort of like this (but probably better). While most aspects of the game are borrowed heavily from Rockstar's GTA franchise (a lot of the controls are the same!) this game puts a little twist on it. The best part of the gameplay is torture/executions. You can abuse people in all sorts of ways like slamming them into a wall, throwing them out of windows, threatening them, setting them on fire, etc. But with this aspect come the controls. In order to engage in physical combat you need to use the right thumbstick...the same right thumbstick that controls the camera. I have never heard of a game that uses the right thumbstick for both camera and action, and now I know why. It doesn't work very well. Also, the sensitive controls can cause you to pound someone in the head and kill them when all you wanted to do was turn around. This is bad if you're trying to extort business. It's hard to extort a business run by a dead guy...

Oh yeah, extortion, I forgot to mention. There are a few things to do in this game, you can complete the main quest which follows the movie's story-line, and then there are the sidequests (taking over warehouses, extorting businesses, assassinating people). The main quest is sort of fun if you have seen the movies. You get to play out all the major events in the movie (except the Las Vegas stuff, you're stuck in New York in this game). It's fun to see a videogame recreation of such famous scenes as Don Corleone getting shot and the baptism executions. Unfortunately these are short and if you limited yourself to only doing these then the game is over for you pretty quickly. So you gotta do sidequests! Assassinations are the BEST part of this game. It forces you to sneak in among your enemies and kill a VIP in another family. you get rewards for doing them a particular way (e.g. use a baseball bat, strangulation, make it look like an accident.) These are fun and there aren't nearly enough of them.

The rest of the side quests, extortion and warehouses, aren't much fun at all and there are WAY to many of them. They both follow the same pattern, you come to a store or large building, kill everyone in a funny colored suit (red, yellow, green, or purple) that's inside. If you're extorting, you need to torture the business-owner to convince him to work with the Corleones. Besides the annoyance that comes from accidentally pissing off or killing the store owner, there's also a good chance that gang members will randomly spawn behind you when you do it and then kill you. The AI is terrible, all the villains follow the same patterns, run up to you and shoot, then hide behind something. No real challenge unless one of the stupid AI guys gets stuck behind something and you don't see him and then he shoots you in the back after everyone dies. If you can put up with this repetitive and annoying gameplay for a while you might notice that every building you come into is a clone of about 50 other ones you have already seen. This is nice because then you already know where to go in the building and where are the gangsters are probably hiding. You can even do the exact same tactics that worked before for a different building and they will work just the same. Lot's of repetitive killing fun.

Another part of the gameplay is that if you kill enough members of a gang family, they start a "vendetta" against you and your family. They will open fire on you whenever they see you and sometimes they will crash their cars into you. A (very long) timer counts down until the family gets revenge by destroying one of your beloved buildings that you worked so hard for. A nice idea, but it takes a lot to start a vendetta and its laughably easy to get out of one. Basically they tried to add a touch of realism and it turned out to be very unrealistic. I killed at least 30 members of a rival family to get a vendetta and somehow the vendetta stops if I pay off an FBI agent WTF?

Then there is the driving. With controls exactly like GTA, driving is a sinch. And the old-style cars are so heavy, they never tip over and they can take a lot of damage. Driving is without any challenge, especially due to the stupid AI that I mentioned earlier. No matter how fast your car is, your enemies drive faster than you. They are also idiots. Someone puling up alongside you? Slam on the breaks, they'll wipe out. Every time. You can evade capture and death by driving backwards, then forwards over and over again on the same 100 feet of road. Nice. And don't worry about traffic, just honk your horn and no one will run into you, I promise.

That about sums up game play with an amazing 5 out of 10. Bad basic controls, bad AI, not enough campaign or assassinations, too much repetition. Overall, you feel no compulsion to replay this or even finish playing it the first time. I promise the other sections will be a lot shorter.

GRAPHICS (8/10)
The Good: The way I see it, if you're playing a PS2 game, you rally don't care that much about graphics. This game pretty decent for the PS2. Not a high level of detail on everything, but when considering how many people, vehicles, buildings, and things are on screen at once, it's pretty amazing. Much better than GTA's graphics anyway. The people have moving mouthes, their faces really look like people. The movie characters actually look like their film counterparts (except Michael, but that wasn't really their fault. Apparently Al Pacino's face is a registered trademark). The cars look like classic cars, too, and they show damage when they get hit, which is nice.

The Bad: Repetition, repetition, repetition. You start to notice that every run-of-the-mill gangster, regardless of family, looks exactly the same. You abuse, harass, and extort the same people all over again. The guy you just killed can be seen walking down the street a minute later, there are about four different drivable vehicles with another four colors to choose from. You get the picture. What you get from the level of detail is hurt by seeing those same detail again and again.

SOUND (4/10)
This is where the game hurts really bad. Before you flame me, I LOVE the Godfather theme music. It is great. i also like the fact that they used it in the game, because in my opinion, the movies would be nothing without that amazing score. But to hear it over and over again. Long story short, there isn't a lot of music in this game, and what they have is repeated ad nauseam. The same music reserved for really dramatic scenes in the movie gets used for... driving to New Jersey. To me, it seems like they didn't bother putting much original music into the game and they didn't think about when to use the music they had. It seems like the music is put on a random cycle, it's that bad. I wish they had put a radio station in the cars (I know, another GTA comparison). I actually like swing music, why not put that in the game?

The voice acting is top-notch for the campaign mode. I may have already mentioned that they got the real actors to be the VA's (Including Brando!). On the other hand. the voice acting for the random, nameless, worthless people is pretty bad. It's repeated all the time (like a lot of stuff in the game) and the acting isn't very good either. The VA for the playable character is really annoying. for instance. I also get sick of hearing the same shouts of "Somebody call the cops!" when I'm driving around, not even breaking the law or hurting anyone.

The sound effects are about average, somewhat repetitive (especially the car horn). Altogether nothing memorable (except that awful horn).

STORY (4/10)
I'll do my best to analyze without spoiling the plot of the Godfather. The story of the Godfather game is exciting, dramatic, emotional, even beautiful you might say. Of course bits and pieces are left out making it seem a bit incoherent sometimes. If I had to judge this game based on it's plot had it not been a movie I'd give it an 8, for a good story and decent story-telling. Of course you may have noticed the 4 I gave it. As it turns out, the only good parts of this game's story is the stuff taken directly from the movie.
The other stuff, relating to your character (who does not exist in Coppola's film fyi) is not so good. His role seems forced into the story, the other characters added in to complement him are pretty 2-dimensional, the plot is rally predictable, and the most dramatic part of his story happens early on in the main story about the Corleone family. Just leaves something to be desired altogether. It seems like they were to afraid to stay off of the movie's story to build up the game's very well.

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So that's my review for The Godfather game for PS2. In summary, it is a mere shell of the movie, with gameplay and replayability, killed by crummy AI and controls and repetitive gameplay. It succeeds in paying tribute to the film and nothing else. Borrow it from a friend if you can find it, rent it if you absolutely love the Godfather and have to play it. Otherwise, just watch the movie. Or play GTA. Or read a book.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/06