The Godfather II

The Godfather II

There’s no faulting Godfather II’s ambition in attempting to convey the complexities, territorial conquests and day-to-day criminalities of the Noo Yawk Cosa Nostra. But is it bada-bing or a big bada-boom…?

Our story begins in 1958 Havana, where the Corleone clan and Hyman Roth have gathered to discuss how to divide the spoils of the Cuban operation. All is going swimmingly when revolutionary rebels unexpectedly storm the hotel. Straight away it falls to you, as up and coming soldier Dominic, to escort the Corleones to safety. What follows is an all too brief blast through the Havana streets, enjoying the occasional spectacular explosion, blowing away the bad guys and familiarising yourself with the game’s combat mechanics before your immediate boss, Aldo Romano, gets himself shot. A fortunate turn of events for you, since Michael Corleone soon asks you to step into Aldo’s shoes and start your own ‘family’.

But first it’s back to the mean streets of the Big Apple where rival wiseguy, Carmine Rosato, has been getting ideas above his station and needs to be sent an unequivocal “message”. To which end the whole of the main game in all its workings are opened up, rinsed and repeated.

Getting to Carmine won’t be easy - he’s a ‘made’ man and is well-protected. So let’s hit him where it hurts by taking back a few of his businesses. These are highlighted on a cool-looking 3D map - the ‘Don’s View’ of the city, where you can keep track of all their personnel, investments and interests, as well as those of your rivals. At a basic level, though, it’s an easy, if occasionally confusing way of seeing your current location, what your adversaries are up to and where you next need to be.

Taking over a rival’s business is a relatively painless process. Drive up in your newly stolen set of wheels and brawl/shoot your way through any heavies in attendance before locating the business manager. Thereafter it’s a case of making them an offer they can’t refuse - i.e. by duffing them up to the point of submission without actually killing them, whereupon they’re happy to surrender the joint without any more fuss.

Here we encounter a number of key gameplay features. Firstly businesses come in several varieties - drugs, prostitution, gun running and so on. Reclaiming all in a particular group gives you ownership of the whole crime ring, as well as being a ready source of cash - some businesses being more lucrative than others. It also awards you with useful items such as brass knuckles or bullet-proof vests. However all be lost just as easily if the former owner spots that you’ve left a business unmanned, thus it’s sensible to make sure you leave enough guards behind, while keeping an eye on the bottom line to make sure you’ve got enough money rolling in to pay them.

You could even appoint one of your personal henchmen to keep an eye on any particular place. It’s possible to recruit seven into your family and you can take up to three on any single mission, each possessing a speciality such as medic, explosives experts etc. Frankie P introduces you to your first few goodfellas, but others are easy enough to locate, hanging around your properties just begging to be noticed.

All of the above adds a potentially interesting strategic element to the gameplay - recruiting and choosing the right guys for the task in hand, employing enough muscle to keep your newly acquired business interests safe afterwards, upgrading henchmen’s abilities and so on. In practice, though, it’s rather less compelling. It doesn’t seem to matter how well you protect your premises, when they’re likely to be seized back while you‘re otherwise engaged. Notice of such events amounts to a static picture of Tom Hagen announcing that “mobster X has just taken back premises Y” too, so you don’t even get the satisfaction of a live gunfight for supremacy.

However, such skirmishes are just a small part of a much bigger quest as you work to make the Corleones the most powerful Mafia clan in the US. This requires rubbing out the guys at the top of five other families, first in New York but then to Florida and eventually back to Cuba itself. This requires eliminating every member of a rival’s family tree which, sadly, is no straightforward matter of finding them and popping a cap in their digital behinds. Instead players have to locate somebody connected to an opponent’s clan who needs a ‘favour’ doing - maybe a business bombed or a designated target snuffed out. Finding folks who need favours doing is a bit hit and miss, but once you’ve made them happy they’ll give you the ‘Kill Conditions’ detailing how the bad guy you’re after should be despatched. At which point you can mark them for death on your map and away you go, making sure you follow the very specific instructions when you get there - with wince-inducingly vivid results, if you get it right.

So Godfather II is a GTA-styled criminal empire ‘em up, with brutal executions, fruity language and elements of resource management - all based on a cherished movie franchise, of course. We should be loving it, yet that hasn‘t been our experience. In the first place the combat sections are spoiled by your team’s inhuman ability to withstand gunfire, rendering much of the game a bit, y’know, easy. In the second instance it all becomes a bit of a chore and promising strategic elements are spoiled by clumsy execution and joyless repetition. Indeed there’s no need at all to indulge in certain aspects, such as levelling up your henchmen, when it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to the actual results.

Finally the whole game feels rather half-finished. Quite literally too - the visuals range from well-crafted renditions of familiar faces sat atop bodies that look borrowed from a last-generation title and fabulous explosions emit from buildings that must have been knocked up in no time at all. Meanwhile cops attempt to shoot you on sight whether you’re up to no good or not, groups of non-playable characters speak with the same voice, only one of your sidekicks gets into your car but all of them miraculously turn up at the other end (did they get the bus?), medics appear from nowhere to revive a target you’ve failed to kill as per the specified method. Speaking of which, the instructions for doing so are all but illegible on a standard definition TV.

Eliminating the five families that stand between ignominy and total domination will take a dozen hours or so. The repetition, rampant inconsistencies in gameplay and graphics, and unintentionally comedic moments mean you might run out of patience long beforehand. The 16-player online variants are marginally more rewarding but, given the choice, we’d rather sleep with the fishes:

2 out of 5