The Godfather II: Crime Rings

The first installment of The Godfather video game shipped right in between GTA 3 and Mafia. Both of these games were critically acclaimed, honest-to-goodness, fantastic games. Things that they had in common included simple, yet effective gameplay, really good driving mechanics, fun and action-packed shootout sequences and, in the case of Mafia, a juicy story to boot. While The Godfather wasn't a terribly bad game, it lacked in all of these areas. The Godfather 2 suffers from all its predecessor's flaws plus some new ones, ironically enough. The main reason for this is that basic game mechanics were left untouched.

The main object of the game is to take control of the businesses and crime rings in New York, Florida and Cuba, eliminating the rival families in the process. You are also made Don of your own family and given the ability to recruit soldiers and promote them throughout the ranks. All in all, this is one of those things that look terrific on paper, but due to it being poorly executed, not financed properly or God knows what, the results are far from what they should have been.

The biggest flaw in the game is the fact that it tries to mix typical GTA-style sandbox action shooter with an RTS. Enter the Don's View. By pressing a key in-game, you get access to an overhead map of the cities, along with an icon for every business, information on who owns it, how many guards there are and some more data. The idea is that you can send your made-men or soldiers in an attempt to take over or defend a business, without you having to physically be there. This is where the balance issues begin. At first, sending your guys to shoot stuff and extort owners doesn't really work that well, but as you open up slots in your family, you start to pretty much outnumber your opponents, so the game, unwillingly, makes you choose between: a) you and 3 other mobsters go in old-school style, experiencing very repetitive and dull combat, an equally frustrating maze-like architecture that doesn't make the slightest sense and risking a (temporary) death or arrest or b) you send all of your 7 family members to take over the racket while you just sit there or do some of the more entertaining side-missions. Both choices suck, but option B gets the upper-hand after a couple of hours of playing. Still sucks, because the game basically plays itself while you watch.

In essence, the game is the same thing over and over and over again: go to a business, kill every guard, kick the owner around, get protection money. Rinse and repeat. This is, literally, all there is to it. Sure, you might have some missions that mix it up a bit, like running away from the police, robbing a bank or something along those lines, but the bread and butter of the game is taking over every single business in every city. Furthermore, in the previous Godfather, you were given the choice to take over rackets or not and the main storyline was separate. Here, it's no longer an option. After a certain point, you need to get every business and eliminate every family before progressing, which makes it even more frustrating. There are some side-missions you can do to earn favors from people which you can cash in at any time, such as bailing your guys out if they get locked up, having them instantly recover if they "die" in combat or just get some extra money. These are more of the same, since they are always about killing someone, cracking a safe open, bombing a business or roughing someone up. Again, while this might sound great at first, the game mechanics and general gameplay makes each mission feel like a chore instead of fun and exciting.

There's also some level of customization for your character and members of your family. You can spend money on getting certain bonuses, like higher accuracy when using small guns or extra health, but in practical terms, most of these hardly make a difference and can be ignored.

Everything in the game looks not only dated but also like the budget ran out. The graphics are so-so. The textures are very simple and plain. Backgrounds and landscapes are lazy. The design for the interior locales are repetitive and tedious to navigate. Visual character customization seems deep, especially because of the clothing and apparel, but then you realize you really don't have many choices for your face and body and start seeing your identical twins all over the city.

Combat is dull at best and extremely boring at worst. Taking cover behind walls or objects is awkward and motivates you to not even bother. The damage dealt to your enemies tends to not make much sense, being able to kill some in one shot and literally empty a full 50 bullet machine gun magazine on others and not kill them. Weapon variety is okay, but there's no correlation between their attributes. These are just some examples of the problems in the combat system in the game.

Probably the only thing this game has going for it is the fact that, if you're a The Godfather fan, you can have a sort of parallel story to the whole anthology and see how some of the events in the book and films fit within the game. Also, Robert Duvall plays Tom Hagen in the game too, so that's two good things.

In closing, The Godfather II is a great idea poorly executed. The result is a frustrating game, sequel to an already not-so-great title, which you should only play if you are a die-hard fan of the Corleone universe. Otherwise, there are far better alternatives out there.