GameSpy
Review
of Godfather 2
Sonny Corleone was a hothead who shot first and never bothered asking questions. His intentions were good but his implementation sucked. His brother Michael, on the other hand, was a man who thought through everything and paid attention to details. He never pulled a gun unless he was going to use it, and when he did, he hit what he aimed at. That's why Michael ended up as the Godfather and Sonny ended up in a pool of blood on the New Jersey Turnpike. As Michael himself might say, "Ideas are good but execution is everything." That brings us to The Godfather II, a game built around a great idea that ends up being more Sonny than Michael.
The Godfather II loosely follows the storyline of the classic Francis Ford Coppola crime drama. Beginning in the late 1950s, the player assumes the role of Dominic, underboss of the New York branch of the Corleone crime family. The tutorial segment follows Michael and Hyman Roth's attempt to ally with the Batista government in Cuba, which gets cut short by Castro's revolution. In the process, the boss of the New York family is gunned down, leaving the player as the new Don. From there it falls to the player to rebuild the Corleone interests in New York, Miami and eventually Cuba in an effort to put the Corleones back on top of the underworld.
The storyline summary also outlines The Godfather II's best idea -- putting the player in the shoes of the Don and letting them run their crime family as they see fit. By using a "Don's View," a sort of pseudo-strategic overview of the game's three cities, players can get a complete outline on what sorts of rackets, crime rings and businesses are available, who owns them, how well they're protected by guards and more. The player as Don can hire and fire guards, assign defenders from within his own crew of "Made" guys to stop enemy takeovers, or send those same guys on their own to take over enemy operations. This view also tracks "Favors" such as contract hits, burglaries, beatdowns and the like that the player can do for special one-use abilities such as calling off the cops or rebuilding a bombed-out business. The game's narrative is used mostly as a guide for the player toward building their empire.
In between managing the family business, the player spends most of their time running around on foot and in cars in classic Grand Theft Auto style, doing things like knocking over banks, intimidating shopkeepers, taking over rackets, burglarizing government offices and assassinating rival family members. This section of the game is again fine in theory. There's an undeniably fun element to the first few New York missions when you're learning what it takes to be a Don. Hit a crime racket and use the left trigger auto targeting and a variety of fun weapons ranging from a .357 Magnum to a Molotov cocktail to kill the place's guards. Then use the Blackhand melee combat system to intimidate the owner into cutting you in on the action by finding their weak points. Some will be vulnerable to punches, grabs, being threatened with tossing off the roof, or simple property damage. The moment after I took over my first crime ring was awesome and I thought that I had finally found the strategy gamers' GTA clone.
It doesn't take too long after those first few missions, though, to realize that there are more holes in Godfather II's gameplay than there were in Sonny Corleone's body. To start, the game is just too bloody easy. The decision to give Dominic and his buddies regenerating health makes every fight a simple exercise in letting your friends act as meat shields while you pick off bad guys with ridiculous ease. While there is a cover system, there's never a reason to use it for anything other than massed fire by the oh-so-stupid enemies. The rest of the time I found myself blithely walking around firefights soaking up bullets and trying to remember which weapon executions I hadn't performed yet so I could get the achievement for doing all of them.
Worse than that, Godfather II commits one of the biggest sins of any sandbox-style games: being a boring and ugly sandbox. From an artistic standpoint, New York, Miami and Cuba are ugly, low-poly worlds filled with cookie-cutter design elements. These include the ever-popular blank walls, boarded-up windows, walls that the player can't climb over, arbitrarily locked or undestroyable doors and windows, and areas that are merely window dressing. I knew the game was in trouble when I first decided to walk around the back yard of the Corleone compound and found myself facing an empty back yard and a brick wall. Where was the infamous garden where Vito Corleone died of a heart attack chasing his grandchild? I realize that Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City is a hard act to follow when it comes to making a city visually interesting, but The Godfather II's blah burgs come off looking like test levels the devs put together using an engine left over from the PS2 era.
For a supposedly "open world" game, the game's not that open. One of my most frustrating moments was realizing that many of the "fronts" the player has to take over are strings of square rooms filled with generic junk looted from the Doom Mars base, along with corridors that block the player's movement via a two-foot tall barrier that Dominic inexplicably cannot vault. There may be indestructible boxes or a magical door that's apparently immune to explosives but can be taken down by a bruiser's fist. It eventually makes every takeover attempt an annoying game of "hunt the owner" through areas that don't look like mazes but are. All too often I found myself fruitlessly running through the same site over and over because I had missed the one door that looks like every other door in an area with almost no landmarks. The fun I'd had during the first few missions was replaced by a determination to never enter another construction site in this game.
Even the "strategic" portion of the game comes off as well-conceived but poorly executed. Owning every business in a "crime ring" (all the gun runners or brothels, diamond smugglers, drug runners and the like) gives that family a special bonus. Owning all the adult entertainment facilities, for examples, will give you cheaper guards while having all the chop shops will give armored cars. Had it worked, this might have given some sort of urgency to the gameplay. The game tells you that bombing a business will take it out of action for a while, thus removing that bonus for an enemy family which can make certain takeover assaults easier and makes some businesses more important than others because of how valuable the bonus is. The idea seemed to be to force the Don to stretch his limited resources simultaneously protecting turf and attacking enemies while picking off weakly defended areas or taking advantage of rival families attacking each other.
In practice it's all window dressing. Most of the bonuses are meaningless. Armored cars for owning all the chop shops would be nice if there was ever any use for them. Cheaper guards are nice but there's so much money laying around the world it's really easy to keep your businesses fully staffed with guards. Worse, they seem to have no impact on how easy it is to kill off enemies. Bullet-proof vests on enemy families -- aren't. Larger ammo clips are meaningless when every enemy seems to have unlimited ammunition. What I had hoped would let me indulge my inner Michael Corleone was frustrated by strategic AI that runs every enemy family as if they were Fredo,
In the end, The Godfather II comes off as a project whose reach far exceeds its grasp. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the game in concept, and done properly, it would easily have established it as a classic on par with the film on which it's based. Instead we get brilliant concepts ham-handedly executed. All I could think of after finishing the game was poor Fredo standing in the house in Nevada whining, "I'm smart! Not like everybody says... like dumb... I'm smart and I want respect!" Respect has to be earned, and The Godfather II doesn't even come close.
©2009-04-07, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
