I'll admit before I start this review: I never saw Godfather Part II. According to Wikipedia, this game is based off of that movie. Ok, I'll let Wikipedia say that it is. I'm here reviewing a game anyway, and not a movie. So I'll get right into things.
The Godfather II starts off in Havana, Cuba during the year 1958. You play as Dominic. You have no last name. I guess you're just cool that way. The game lets you make a custom character, and the amount of choices are really nice. You can make your guy however you want. Sweet. My Dominic was a normal sized, normal height white man with a green T-shirt, blue pants, a 5 o' clock shadow and a badass hat with an ace card in it. I like this guy. My only gripe is the lack of a choice of a female character, but since it's the 1950s this is when men made women stay at home and cook. So I guess it fits for the period.
So, when the Cuban Revolution kicks in you, Fredo Corleone, Michael Corleone and Aldo Trapani need to flee Cuba. Sadly, Aldo is gunned down before he can get out and you escape to New York on a plane. On the bright side, you become the new don in Aldo's place. See? Having friends die is not all that bad when you can profit from it. Thanks for that moral lesson EA! Granted, this is a game about the Mafia, not moral lessons. The story is not all that bad, and is a good Mafia story covering trust, betrayal, the Mafia family and all that jazz. Unfortunately, I herd there was some very serious derailment from the movie, so things may be better if you haven't seen it like me. My biggest gripe about the story is the lack of a real antagonist. There are the rival dons, sure, but after you kill the first one the rest can be marked up as "Loss opportunity." See, none of these dons, save for the first don Carmine Rosato and the fourth Samuele Mangano, none of these dons do anything until you go to kill them. The worst offender is Tony Rosato, who really could have been a central antagonist after you kill his brother, but instead he does nothing until you walk into his house and kill him. Granted there is an end game plot twist about one of the characters pulling the strings, but you almost don't even realise that it happend when it does.
The gameplay consist of taking over enemy crime rings, managing your crime rings and doing favors for people. It's actually suprisingly deep. The game is played from a third-person prespective and follows the normal cues for a third person shooter. The cover system is pretty bad though, so you'd be better not using the system at all. Weapon wise, you got the staples of a TPS. You have a handgun, machinegun, shotgun, rifle and magnum. You also get moltive cocktails, dinimite and bombs. Rounding out the weapons is a garotte and a melee weapon of your choice that could include baseball bats, crowbars, 2X4, nightsticks or golf clubs. Although there is a right punch and left puch button, there is no real point to this because enemies will never put up guard. It feels like they forgot to even add that feature. You have a block button though, but it quickly falls out of use when bullets fly. Because arms can't block guns, no matter how much we wish otherwise. Speaking of the guns, each gun has 3 levels. You can upgrade them by finding the next level hidden somewhere in the world. The game world is a sandbox illusion. I say this because, while it appears to be a sandbox at first the game is pretty not sandboxey. The game is broken into 3 different enviroments: New York, Florda and Cuba. New York and Cuba suffer from being way to small to be of any fun. You can walk from one end to the other in a minute or two. Florda, on the other hand, while not small is laid out in a way that will cause you to get lost very very easily. It's just confusing. The Godfather II will do it's best to hord you to one location or another and the times you are free, finally, you'll spend doing one of two things: Taking over crime rings or doing favors.
You can hire men to work under you. At the beginning of the game you can only have one lonesom soldier, but by the end you can have four soldiers, two capos and an underboss. Soldiers come with one of six skills. Brawlers can break doors, phones and noses. Engeneers can open fences and cut power to buildings. Demo men can blow open walls and doors to let people in, or take down an entire building to keep it out of commission for a day. Medics can revive you or other crew members if they fall in battle. Safecrackers can open up safes for money, or locked doors. Finally arsonist can... light things on fire. That class is all but useless. Still, get one anyway. You'll need one for the game. When a solider becomes a capo they can learn a second skill, and they can learn a third at underboss. While the crew of three that you can take with you make the game easier, there are still issues with them. They have path finding problems at times that cause them to get stuck on corners or other people. Sometimes they also fail to listen to your commands. Still, these guys will be your lifeline. You have to use them or you will get killed. The game is not hard, but there are some parts where you will get killed without these guys.
Most of the shooting will take place when you try and capture crime rings. The other familys are not just going to let you take them. So you need to take it from them by killing them all. Following that you need to intimidate the owner to giving you a share of the money. There are different ways to intimidate the owner and each one has his or her personal weakness. This can range from pointing guns at them, breaking their stuff, threating them or just outright punching them in the face. Fun stuff. Crime rings come in one of ten types. They range from chop shops to gun runners to, my favorite, adult entertainment. There are up to five of a type in the world and owning all of that type give you a bonus. Some of these make sense. For example: Owning all the chop shops gets you access to armord cars. Some... make less sense. Getting all the diamond smugglers gets you access to bullet proof vest. The strangest? If you get all the gambleing bars you get access to incendiary bullets. No, I'm not sure how that works. It just does. Sometimes rival familys will attack your crime rings. You can hire guards to protect them, or send your made men to go assist. You can also stop by yourself and lend a hand. You can only be attacked though if the other familys have made men. You can assassinate them, but it has to be done in a specific way. So, yes, the guy won't die if you shoot him in the face twenty times. He'll just go to the hospital. He'll only die if you throw him into the Hudson River. The other thing to do in this game is favors. Some people want favors done and will either pay money, give you info on other family's made men on how to kill them and where they are or do return favors. Favors come in a few types, but all end up being the same few: Either kill a guy, beat a guy up, break stuff, steal something, light something on fire or blow something up. There is no difference between the bunches of favors and it's, quite frankly, boring. Favors aren't even required to continue the game so there is really no point to them other then cash or achivements/trophies.
The game looks pretty bad for a next gen game. While the graphics are clean and you know what is what, they are still very basic. Shadows, noteably, look really bad. Animations are not all that great too. There is a problem with the lack of a falling animation, likely due to the lack of a jump button. Still, it could be worse. The game does have quite a few glitches as well. For example, I once found a car jammed into the street somehow. Half in, half out. Like a cartoon. The music score is very nice, with all tone setting stuff here. It's all great, and it's easily one of the high points of the game. The voice acting stands out too, with many of the voices fitting the characters and the cast doing a great job delivering. Standing out among the crowd is Robert Duvall, reprising his role as Tom Hagen. Danny Jacobs as Hyman Roth, Gavin Hammon as Frank Pentangeli and John Marino who plays Fredo Corleone stood out as well. Overall, it was all done well. Nothing to complain about here.
Looking back on it, I don't hate my time with The Godfather II. Oh, sure. It could have been better. There should have been some polishing done in a few places. But overall, it's not a bad rental. You could do much worse then this. And at the end of the day, it's all... just business.
