In 2006, Electronic Arts took on the ambitious challenge of adapting Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, one of the most acclaimed films of all time, into a videogame, and jaded gamers everywhere cringed and expected the worst. And they had good reason: the track record of film-to-game adaptations was abysmal in terms of quality at the time (and still is), and despite the rabid success of the Grand Theft Auto series and the long line of not so successful crime-themed franchises that followed in its wake (e.g. The Getaway, True Crime, and Mafia), many critics felt that giving the “GTA treatment” to the very film that in some form or another inspired all of these games was extremely risky, if not outright sacrilege. The Godfather was a weighty, serious film, and it was doubtful whether the videogame medium could balance the subject matter with necessities of an open-world, sandbox action game, primarily action, variety, and fun, all while still remaining faithful to the source material. In the end, EA came through with The Godfather: The Game, a surprisingly meaty game experience that not only did a commendable job of making players feel as though they were an actual participant in several key moments of The Godfather canon, but also incorporated some of the better aspects of the GTA games in conjunction with an engaging extortion/racket/gang war element of its own.

Naturally, with the success of the game across three platforms as well as a re-tweaked and visually improved remake on the Xbox 360 and eventually the Wii, it was inevitable that a sequel based on The Godfather II film would eventually make an appearance. In The Godfather II, you take on the role of Domenic, an underboss to Aldo Trapani, Don of New York and protagonist from The Godfather: The Game. In a respectful and nostalgic nod to the second film, the game opens up with Aldo and Domenic in attendance along with Michael Corleone and Fredo Corleone at the famous 1958 New Year’s Eve meeting of the Five Families in Havana, Cuba, where the ailing Roth proposes a truce to keep the warring factions from tearing each other apart. However, just as a lucrative agreement is reached between the families, the Cuban Revolution arrives violently in the city and sends everyone scattering. When Aldo is killed trying to protect Michael and Fredo during their escape from Cuba , Domenic is quickly thrust by Michael into the role of New York Don and is given the task of quickly forming a new family in order to seize control of New York from the other four families.

Fans of The Godfather II the film beware: as the introduction above suggests, the developers of the game took more than a little creative license to get the story off the ground. Naturally, games based on popular Hollywood films almost always make changes in order to accommodate the interactivity of the medium, and just like in the original The Godfather: The Game, the player takes on the role of a new, non-central character with his own story and destiny in the Godfather universe. This time around however, the lengths to which the developers go to facilitate Dominic’s rise to power literally rewrite The Godfather canon, to the point that events from the film which involved major characters such as Michael, Fredo, Roth and Tom Hagen (the Corleone family’s Consigliere) are drastically altered, postponed, or omitted. If your only introduction to The Godfather was the original game, then this probably will mean nothing to you, but cinéastes will likely be unable to play this game without a bitter taste in their mouths.

Gameplay:

Cutting right to the chase, The Godfather II's (TGII’s) basic play mechanics are similar to that of The Godfather: The Game, except that everything is drastically stripped down. Store fronts no longer need be extorted separately from the rackets operating behind them, as the front owner and racket operator are now one and the same. Rival families’ supply routes no longer need to be intercepted in order to cripple your enemies operations, as violent takeovers accomplish the same effect more quickly. And your actions towards women and regular citizens no longer affect how you are viewed by the public, fear is the new respect in 1958 and you’ll be too busy expanding your empire to make friends…it’s all about the business.

A large part of TGII borrows heavily from GTA: San Andreas’s Turf War mini-game, where you (as Dominic) and your crew (which can consist of up to three members of your “mafia family” at a time) battle mercilessly on behalf of the Corleones against the other four families for complete control of New York and Florida, one business at a time. However, unlike in GTA: SA, where your wingmen were completely faceless, nameless, and expendable, each member of your family and crew in TGII can be hand-picked by you according to their skills and specialities, and once they become a part of the family, they can’t be fired unless you have them killed…just like real family, so you’d best have a good reason for taking someone off the payroll. Each soldier has his own speciality: Medics can revive you and your crewmates when you fall in battle; Bruisers can intimidate people with violence and find ways to smash seemingly impenetrable obstacles; Arsonists specialize in property damage and can scare proprietors by setting things ablaze; Demolition experts are good at blowing things up and can break a rival crime ring simply by bringing down a business key to that operation (or stall one of your operations from being taken over by blowing it up pre-emptively); Safecrackers can pick locks and open safes, making them indispensable during raids and heists and they can also be crucial to finding hidden weapon upgrades in enemy strongholds; and Engineers can cut power to buildings and phone lines, preventing your enemies from calling in reinforcements when you attack their businesses. As Dominic’s active crew can only have three family members in it at a time, players must always choose their lineup carefully to ensure they are bringing the right wiseguys for the right job, or at least have the right available member waiting in the wings, because if your safecracker is away on a raid while you are in the middle of a bank robbery, you’ll have to wait for him to finish up before he can come and help you. Later on in the game you can promote some of your members to “Capo” and eventually “Underboss” status, where they can gain additional specialities and become even more lethal.

Then of course there’s Dominic, who in addition to being armed to the teeth with weapons like tommy guns, pistols, magnums and Molotov cocktails, also has his own melee and close quarters specialties that set him apart from his GTA contemporaries. Much like Aldo Trapani before him, Dominic is a master in the art of violent negotiation, and can grab, throw, pummel, drag, choke and threaten his enemies into giving him whatever he wants, be it money, information, or control over their establishment, and if he no longer needs someone alive, he can brutally execute them with various finishing moves, which are all dependent on the weapon that is in his hands at the time. All of these moves can be accomplished with a very intuitive combat system using the Left and Right triggers to grab, punch and kick while the Left and Right thumbsticks are used to drag, push, slam and even execute whoever might be unlucky enough to be within Dominic’s grasp. While these abilities make interrogations and shakedowns interesting, the executions are TGII’s ultimate guilty pleasure, as their shocking, cartoonish and over-the-top violence both accurately evoke the brutality of the original films yet lampoon it at the same time. The first time you watch Dominic plug the business end of a tommy gun into a stunned Rosato Family soldier’s mouth and fill it full of hot lead, you’ll probably cringe, but two hours into the game you’ll recklessly be running up to enemies during a fire-fight just to see it again, and then the next time you’ll switch to another weapon like a crowbar, a pistol or even Dominic’s bare hands just to see what creative form of madness his rage takes next.

There are some problems, however. Driving in TGII is very little more than a means to an end, as in strictly getting you and your crew from point A to point B, and is probably the least fun part of the game. The controls are stiff, the roads are extremely narrow and it is nearly impossible to navigate a city street without trading paint with another vehicle or bringing down a lamppost. Dominic can’t even shoot out the window himself during a chase...he has to rely on his crewmates to do it for him while he drives, and they have a nasty habit of being indiscriminate with their aim, taking down cops, pedestrians and enemy Mafioso alike. Stranger still, even a loaded Don like Dominic doesn’t have his own chauffeur, nor can he take a local cab, not even from the airport, so the tedium of driving cannot be skipped to save time, period. On the bright side (or not, depending on how you look at it), the sense of scale in TGII borders on claustrophobic, even in comparison to the original GTA III, so you never have to drive too far (the average time to drive across downtown Florida is less than five minutes, for example), and in most situations, the police are very, very easy to evade.

Keeping in theme with Dominic’s role as Don of New York, EA has introduced an entirely new in-game interface called “The Don’s View”, which quite literally adds a whole new layer of strategy to the proceedings. Accessed by pressing the Start button, The Don’s View is a scalable, virtual-3D city map and command center from where not only can the player observe his or her location, set waypoints and oversee all territories within his or her domain, he or she can also manage all aspects of “the family business” and keep tabs on Dominic’s enemies. For example, rival families’ money-laundering fronts, prostitution houses, gambling houses and other rackets can be targeted for attacks or bombings (a successful attack on an enemy business will lead to a takeover, while a bombed business will break an family’s monopoly over a particular racket and take away any perks that come along with it until that establishment is rebuilt). Rackets under Dominic’s control can then be fortified with guards (as long as you have enough money to pay their salaries). Likewise, rival families will bomb or attempt to retake your businesses at random intervals as well, even when you are in the middle of a mission, so regularly checking The Don’s View is key to maintaining control of your empire.

Also from within The Don’s View, players can access Dominic’s “Family Tree”, where family members, even those actively in your crew, can be selected and given orders to help guard businesses, go defend them during attacks, or lead assaults against rival properties. When members of your crew are sent on missions, they leave your crew and become inaccessible until their mission ends in either success or failure, with failure resulting in a longer wait for their return as they recover in the hospital, so it is wise to be careful who you send, especially early on in the game when your family is still weak. But once you have more family members with upgraded abilities and have promoted your strongest and most useful soldiers to the rank of Capos and Underbosses (who are even more versatile because they can have more than one specialty), you’ll find it easier to send out your troops to do your dirty work for you while you concentrate on other important matters, just like a real Don. Once you find yourself attempting a solo hit with Dominic against an enemy Capo and his small band of defenders while two of your men are attacking a small racket and another three are fiercely defending a key establishment in your construction racket against a hostile takeover, you will quickly come to understand how tense and exciting TGII is at its best.

Finally, an element of TGII that should not be overlooked is the total elimination of rival families, as not only is it a necessary requirement to winning the game but it is also very entertaining…in most respects. Just as you can view your Family Tree in the Don’s View, you can also view the family trees of your rivals and plot strategies for taking them out. Every enemy soldier, Capo or Underboss must be eliminated before a final assault can be launched against a rival family’s compound, and each one of them can only be permanently eliminated if their murder matches a unique “kill condition”, such as being strangled to death, thrown into the East River or shot in the head with a sniper rifle. The only way to learn each target’s “kill condition” is to do favours for people in exchange, and apparently, in The Godfather universe, there are a lot of people walking around with dark secrets and unsavoury deeds that need doing. Once you’ve done enough favours and killed off every soldier, Capo and Underboss of a rival family, you can take the battle to their compound and bomb it to bits, wiping that family off the map forever. While addictive and a lot of fun, there is a lot of tedium as well, as each of the four families have several members and having to complete a “favour mission” to earn the kill condition for each one becomes rather dull after a while, especially when many of them are the same mission, requested in the exact same dialogue, just by a different looking person and taking place in a different location. Also, there never seems to be any relation between the people asking the favours and the kill conditions they give you in return, nor any real poetry or meaning in the way that a rival family member should be dispatched, even though each member of the Family Tree has a bio that suggests a more fitting way to end them. For instance, why would the kill condition of a Capo who is dreadfully afraid of heights be to “strangle him to death”?

Graphics:

With both Grand Theft Auto IV and its closest competitor Saints’ Row II having been on store shelves now for over half-a-year now, it is impossible for TGII to escape being judged by the same yardstick, and quite simply, the game looks as though it is still stuck between console generations. On the positive side, The Don’s View interface is extremely slick, well-designed and carefully thought out, with perhaps the only crime being that it is a bit too busy and overloaded with icons and information. However, the simplistic, condensed design which makes The Don’s View work so well visually seems to have also bled down into the design of the game world itself, creating an unrealistic sense of scale that encroaches negatively upon the gameplay. As I mentioned earlier, roads are extremely narrow and difficult to navigate smoothly, as if they were made to strictly conform to the stylistic design of the city maps in the Don’s View and not the actual vehicles that drive on them. In New York, the Corleone compound and the home of their rivals, the Rosatos, are practically right next door to one another, and the nearest businesses are a one minute drive away. Things open up a bit more in Florida, but even the game world feels extremely condensed, as if the whole game were taking place on a 50’s Hollywood movie lot rather than in a living, breathing city.

The cutscenes, on the other hand, are well done and the all the major characters, apart from Michael Corleone (who neither resembles or sounds like Al Pacino for legal reasons, most likely) look and sound very much like their film counterparts. Fredo, and Hyman Roth are particularly well done and Robert Duvall, the actor who played Tom Hagen in the original films has returned again to give voice to his digital counterpart. These voices give weight to their characters’ designs and at times are even good enough to remind players of the greater film legacy that the game is based on. On the other hand, pedestrians, cops, family members (your own as well as your enemies’) and other minor characters are bland, generic and are essentially the same 25 character models reused over and over again with different haircuts, hair colours, and clothes. This recycling takes a great deal of the fun out of dramatic encounters, especially the hunting down of rivals you have marked for death, as literally everyone of them apart from the Don have exactly the same face, even though they may not be blood related or share the same last name.

Visual effects are solid, though. Executions are deliciously gory, and fire and explosions are impressive, especially when witnessing a Molotov cocktail flatten a group of oncoming foes and send them scattering off in flames, or sitting back and watching the TNT-fuelled obliteration of an enemy compound as reward for taking another rival family out of the picture. TGII may lack variety, but there is no shortage of action for wiseguy wannabes.

Sound:

As mentioned above, TGII features some quality voice acting, but there is also a lot of hit and miss. To make things worse, the game is rife with quotes lifted from The Godfather movies, except they are often coming out of the mouths of characters who didn’t originally say them, and the new people are far less interesting, Dominic included. Also, since doing favours for people is necessary for completing the game, you are also bound to be asked the same favour over and over again, sometimes in different ways but more often than not in the exact same way, by the same voice actor or actress. Now and then however, when passing pedestrians on the street you’ll hear random comments that humorously place the game in late 1950s America, such as “We came this close to total annihilation!” (A reference to the Cuban Missile crisis), and “Why don’t the satellites fall back to earth?”

Like the visuals effects, however, the sound effects do not disappoint. Weapons sound powerful, car crashes are cringe-inducing (though there are far too many fender benders to count), and the sounds of explosions from ruptured propane tanks, bomb-rigged cars, or a well-placed stick of dynamite will make you sit up in your chair and take notice.

Longevity:

Neither as long or as difficult as its predecessor, The Godfather II promises about 20 hours of gameplay in single-player, but also offers online multiplayer modes where players can use their actual henchmen from the solo campaign to battle online, earn money and unlock honours which allow for weapon upgrades for all your men. You see, unlike in The Godfather: The Game, weapon upgrades in TGII cannot be bought, they must be found within the game world. Dominic can use these weapon upgrades immediately, but in order for your family members to be able to use them you must first take them online in multiplayer to earn honours which will unlock upgraded weapon licenses. Alternatively, you can mark an under-performing family member for death and simply bring in a new family member with a higher skill level. While the online license upgrade concept will certainly appeal to players who enjoy multiplayer action and will likely add several hours of gameplay to their TGII experience, people who are interested in the solo campaign will probably find the concept extremely contrived and unnecessary for several reasons. First, the idea that a Mafioso would need a license in order to use a weapon goes against the entire point of organized crime. Second, it only takes a few hours of playing TGII to discover that there are only five or so types of looks and voices for your family members (even their mug shots in the family tree are pallet swaps), which immediately breaks the illusion that they are actual individuals with distinct personalities that you can become attached to. Why bother building them up when you can simply rub them out and bring in someone more skilled? Finally, weapon upgrades really do not make much difference in the overall effectiveness of your family members either in the field or in The Don’s View. When they’re a part of your crew, your combat skills and your ability to wield any weapon more than make than make up for any shortcomings they may have, and in The Don’s View the strength of a family member is largely dependent on their rank (A soldier is as strong as 5 regular guards, a Capo is as strong as 10 regular guards, etc.). So it actually makes more sense to go against the family, at least when it’s in the interest of family. Sorry, Michael.

Overall:

The Godfather II is not a game that should be played because it is “bigger and better” than its predecessor, as it is certainly not as long or as deep an experience, but instead it should be at least given a chance for its satisfying and plentiful on-foot action sequences and the addictive new strategy and resource-management elements which The Don’s View brings to the table. There is still one more Godfather film waiting to be made into a game, and as it is generally considered by most fans to be the worst in the trilogy, EA will have an excellent opportunity (and perhaps a little more creative license) to take all the depth and complexity of their first game, meld it with the action and strategy of TGII and bring us a final magnum opus of a game that will give truly give us both old and new Corleones to love and other families we genuinely love to hate – along with poetic and creative ways and end their lives.