The Godfather II

"What happens when game companies value graphics and gimmicks over gameplay"

Trust me, I loved The Godfather games. I played them on the Wii AND on the Xbox 360, and I thought they were a delightfully fun set of games with plenty of replay value. So understandably I was excited when they finally stopped making different versions of this game, milking it for all it was worth, and announced the Godfather part II, based on the movie of the same name.

I expected a well-designed game that, like the first one, tied in well with the events of the movie, with plenty of things to do, a large map, the variety of weapons and weapon upgrades, the feeling of bringing an underdog crime family up through the ranks by brutally powering your way through the weak points in the other families, eventually finding your way to revenge. Basically, I expected what the first game was, but improved - after all, isn't that the ideal of what a sequel should be?

I must say, I feel like going back in time and kicking myself when I made the decision to buy this game for 40 dollars CAD. Why? Well, where do I begin?

Graphics - 8/10

Quite good. In fact, this is the only GOOD part about this game. They're much improved over the first game. The clothes are well detailed, the sun effects are great, all in all everything is well detailed. It's much more pleasing to the eye than first game. However, to quote the Angry Video Game Nerd: "The graphics are better, but my point is, EVERYTHING should be better!"

Yes, graphics help game immersion, but I feel that the game designers felt that this was the only thing they SHOULD improve, and they should regress everything else to save time. Again, another casualty of the "graphics are everything, gameplay... what's gameplay again?" craze that has swept modern gaming and is producing many, MANY poor games with great graphics.

As you no doubt may notice, I really don't care much about graphics. If I wanted something with good graphics, I would watch a movie. Lord knows The Godfather part II - the movie - is far better than it's game. Far, far, far better. Which brings me to the next and most important part:

Gameplay - 4/10

Horribly. Horribly. Horribly dissapointing. It's exactly the same as the first one - but less entertaining. Let me say at first I wanted to like this game's gameplay. I mean, the idea of having more than one crew member with you - one of the only redeeming features of this game and one of the only improvements over it's predecessor - was great. So was the idea of having specialties for each of your crew members. Let me explain how this works.

You can find various gangsters on the street or around your businesses, trying to get your attention to become part of the family. Each of them has their own personality - which was a nice touch - and specialty. You can get medics, who keep your crew alive, engineers, who can break into places and cut power and phone lines to aid in your assault, arsonists, who can set things on fire... I could go on, but what's the point? The only thing you'll ever REALLY need is a medic, and I'll discuss that in the next section. All other abilities are only neccessary now and again when you want to get into a few buildings.

You can have one guy at first, gradually expanding up to four soldiers, three capoes (who are stronger and have two specialties), and one consiglere and underboss each (who I'm honestly not sure what their abilities are, and nor do I care). This was nice. You can have three people with you instead of just one. This was even nicer.

But you know what? The biggest dissapointing factor about the gameplay is that it's just boring. First of all, you have three cities you can go to - New York, where you start, Florida, the next level, and Cuba, the final level. This sounded interesting - I mean, three different cities - until you realize you can drive across the laughably small New York map in less than five minutes, and that there are less than fifteen businesses available for you to take over. There aren't even seperated businesses and rackets anymore - rackets are the main part of your income and are no longer hidden behind legit businesses, whereas businesses stand alone all the time and multiply your income.

But Florida and Cuba must be bigger, right? Nope. Florida is only a bit bigger than New York. Cuba I have never seen from being so bored with the game that I quit playing it before I ever got that far, but from what I've heard isn't much bigger than Florida. What the hell, EA? What the hell? What happened to the Godfather's huge New York map with tons of things to do and get into? What happened to the dozens upon dozens upon dozens upon dozens of regular businesses, let alone compounds and rackets on top of those? Did you forget that that was one of the main reasons why the Godfather part I's game was so popular?!

As you might have figured out by now, the game maps are smaller, and this means the game is surprisingly short. It matters little - if you're like me, you're going to get so bored with it you'll never reach Cuba. This is after about one or two hours of gameplay, mind you, before I got incredibly bored with it.

There are other oh-so-neat ideas that were dissected. Such as rackets being part of "crime rings". These give you bonuses when you control all of the businesses in that ring, some of which may be in other cities. But I won't go into those, as they make an already far too easy and boringly short game to it's next point:

Difficulty - Dissapointingly easy.

Another part of what makes the game so dissapointingly boring is that the game is far, far too easy. As long as you have a Medic in your group, it will be very, very hard for you to die. The only way to lose all your health is pretty much to get run over by a car. This is due to a number of factors:

1. Your enemies can't shoot worth a damn. They must have studied at the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. This is a far cry from the Godfather series' first game, where a single goon with a tommy gun could kill you if you didn't shoot first. This was a refreshing burst of realism, that they promptly dissected and murdered in the Godfather part II.

2. Your medic apparently heals you over time, quite quickly I might add. You can get all your health back in twenty seconds - sometimes less. This makes health powerups almost useless, and again is a far cry from the first game, where you NEEDED health powerups to survive, and the health powerups didn't heal you instantly - they got your health back over time. SLOWLY. Not only that, but your health regeneration was interrupted if you got shot. Not so here. This means that you can easily laugh off shotgun blasts to the face and a tommy gun magazine to the chest, and concentrated fire is needed to take you down. Not only this, but you can get kevlar vests that make you even further bulletproof - I don't want to imagine how much enemy fire it would take to bring you down after you get that particular upgrade.

3. Enemy goons go down with one hit from a Magnum and five bullets from a Tommy gun. It's very easy to kill them - even moreso than in the first game.

4. If you're in cover, you are basically impossible to hit, even when leaning out to fire.

5. Your medic can revive you if you lose all your health. You can do the same for your crime family - assuming enemies ever manage to get enough fire concentrated on them for them to die.

I won't go into further detail, but suffice it to say that this game is easy enough for little kids, despite obviously not being a little kid's game. Why, EA, why? Why do you target demographics who LIKE games with more difficulty than what you provide them? Is it because you received complaints that players died too much in the Godfather part I? You know what? Dying is an important part of a game's experience that prevents the player from doing stupid things. Even if you wanted to make the game a little bit easier, why did you go so far as to make the Medic so game-breaking? Did you think that making it impossible to die made the game just a little bit easier? Well, you were wrong. It means dying is very rare, and when it does happen, all that happens is that you lose a bit of money - nothing else. It feels cheap, ripped off, and above all, it means there is no reward for playing the game. If there's no chance of dying, no chance of losing, no chance of failing, what's the point of playing the game? Even if there's a small chance of dying, when you add in the fact that there are almost no penalties beyond a slap on the wrist for it, it means the game really is pointless. There is no feeling of victory at the end.

Let's not even go onto the game's Favor system, which makes the game even easier. By doing a simple mission that usually involves "Smash up this place" or "shoot this person", you can instantly remove all cop activity towards your person. Instantly. From the game's menu. Again and again, with no limit upon how many times this can be done that I have discovered. And if you ever get in financial trouble, don't worry - just go up to a random person on the street with money over their heads, talk to them, and either shoot someone, blow up a place, smash up a place, or do something else pointless to get thousands of dollars in cash, instantly... Ugh.

Sound - 8/10

One of the only other redeeming factors. The gun noises sound even cooler and more realistic, especially the Tommy gun, which really does show where the gun got it's nickname of the "Chicago Typewriter." Sadly, it's not enough to pull this game out of it's rapid nosedive in fun.

Story - 4/10

Like the gameplay and difficulty, this is just another dissapointing slump in this overhyped game. The story starts in Cuba, with Dominic, the game's protagonist, meeting with Hyman Roth, a Cuban businessman who was of some importance in the movie, in Cuba, along with Michael Coreleone, the new Don of the Corleone crime family. Or at least in Las Vegas. More on that later.

The game goes downhill right from the opening, where you realize that the important figures of the movie have been distilled down into a bunch of one dimensional mission factories. The voice acting is good, but nobody ever does anything - nobody ever says anything from the movie, with the exception of one Family member who quotes the movie when he says "Your father respected Hyman Roth, your father did business with Hyman Roth, but your father never TRUSTED Hyman Roth!"

The ingenius way in which the original game wove the protagonist's plot into the movie's is gone here, replaced by you immediately, without ANY effort whatsoever, getting Donship of New York. Dominic the Don. (very clever, EA, very clever)

However, before this, in the opening sequence, the Family is celebrating a large business deal done in Cuba. What's involved in the deal? I really don't know, beyond that it's worth two million dollars and involves Hyman Roth. The cinematic misses out on key plot points.

Then the Cuban President resigns from his post in the wake of rebel attacks, supposedly so that no more attacks will take place. This instantly sends the city into riots and somehow spurs both the military and the rebels into action, exactly the opposite of what the president supposedly wanted. Who's the President? I dunno. Castro maybe? I really dunno, the game never tells us. Why is everything suddenly crazy, instantly? I dunno. Why exactly was the President stupid enough to think that resigning would somehow stop the rebels? I dunno. Who are the rebels - what do they fight for? I dunno.

Then, as the Corleones try to flee Cuba, a military sniper kills Dom's boss at the airport, Aldo Trapani, the protagonist from the first game. Instantly - and it isn't even a good death scene. Dom shows no real remorse. Michael doesn't either. He's just killed and then written out of the story, and almost everyone forgets him except on very rare occasions where he's mentioned. Who killed him? Who had him killed? I dunno. Just some random sniper who thought it would be a good idea to start shooting at civilians.

Compare that to the first game, where Aldo's family had been murdered by Don Barzini and the entire game is basically about getting vengeance for Aldo. Do you think this game storyline is anything about vengeance? No. Don just accepts this punch in the gut and moves on, forgetting his boss ever existed unless someone brings him up, and goes on to making a huge amount of money.

There are new families in town, one of which you promptly take turf away from (again, this takes a dissapointingly short time) and then assault their compound (Again, way too easy). Why? Well, apparently the guy who runs it is a backstabbing bastard. Okay. What's his family called? I dunno, they were so one-dimensional I forgot. There's no development of the family what soever. What do they do? What are they into? I dunno. Just kill them all and move on. I could go on, but you probably already see how dull, depressing, lifeless, and incomprehensible the storyline is.

Replay Value - 2/10

Almost nil. There's not a lot to do - there aren't a lot of missions available, not a lot of side objectives. Once you've finished the game, apparently all you can do is just run around and shoot people, all the other mob bosses having been killed. The game is so depressingly linear that I tried to play it for this review and just didn't get anywhere. I didn't have the will, and shut it off after five minutes. I don't think I'll ever be starting it up again, despite me never finishing it, because the replay value of the first game still isn't there, will never be there, and I don't want to face the depressing, dull, lifeless story knowing that it's the only real thing to do in this game.

Overall - 4/10

As a sequel to the first one - it's a horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible attempt. That is my opinion.

Rent or buy - RENT, OR BETTER YET, DON'T BUY IT AT ALL.

If you're looking for a game that is like the first Godfather game, stay very very far away from this one. It's only the first one's sequel by name and appearance. That's all. If you think you might like it, rent it - it's so easy, you'll probably finish it in a week anyway.

So please, please God, I am begging you, do not make the same mistake I made and waste 40$ on this. That is my review, goodnight. I'm going to go and trade this in tommorrow and use the little bit of money I'll get from it to get a much more appealing and fun game.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/24/09

Game Release: The Godfather II (US, 04/07/09)