The Godfather II
Act like a mobster, think like a Don. This is the war cry from Electronic Arts as it challenges Grand Theft Auto a second time for the crown of ultimate crime game.
It is three years since EA brought The Godfather to consoles, plenty of time for reflection on a not half-bad open world crime game famed for not pulling its punches. In the 2009 follow-up the focus has shifted slightly away from pure sensationalist violence, moving toward gangster politics; balancing the ‘strategic thinking of a Don’ with ‘furious combat of a mobster’. That’s not to say the violence has been wholly curtailed, rather that it now has its place in the bigger picture.
A new central character, Dominic, is Don of the Corleone family and personifies the new more thoughtful direction. Meanwhile online modes that feature Family versus Family face offs are the other headline for The Godfather II. Whereas mobster Aldo Trapani in the previous game provided visceral subjective thrills for the player, Dominic must use his cunning to recruit, promote, customize, and develop the unique skills across seven members of his ‘crime family’. Traits honed in the one-player Story Mode can then be taken online for a survival of the smartest. Or else, okay, the most ruthless!
As you may have seen in the recent trailer showing here on Yahoo! UK Games, there are six main disciplines at your disposal: Safe Cracker, Medic, Engineer, Bruiser, Demolitionist and Arsonist. You’ll manage their ‘day to day’ using a 3D map dubbed ‘Don’s View’ – a clever gameplay addition that makes the game world seem less daunting while at the same time full of unexplored potential. Sure you didn’t see Michael Corleone use anything like this in the movie but nobody’s pretending that this is high-brow entertainment. It’s just fun, for want of a better word, to get involved in this most famous world of corruption and deceit – and occasionally cross paths with the drama’s most famous characters that include Senator Geary. Indeed it is Michael Corleone himself that tasks you with rebuilding his empire in New York and then further into Miami. Check you out!
The way this all pans out is that you’ll head to the streets with your Crew in tow, selecting up to three guys according to the skills required. While on site you can give orders and keep your distance or get your hands dirty. If you enjoyed the ‘Black Hand’ combat system in the previous game, ‘Black Hand 2.0’ is even more brutal and now incorporates graphic execution techniques too horrible to relate here.
If you’d rather shy away from such goings-on you can run the game like a game of Monopoly (well, sort of) by organising Crime Rings, basically owning the lion’s share of similar operations, e.g. firearms or vehicles. If you are in control you’ll get a boost in those areas meaning bigger and better guns and meaner, sexier wheels.
As for the online antics, the basic idea seems promising: as many as 16 Dons enter the same city to battle for control. Apparently the spoils of war can benefit your family in the one-player Story mode and vice-versa. We suspect The Godfather II could transform some ordinarily very nice people into some spectacularly very bad people indeed.
The Godfather II is released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC on 27 February.
