A lot of people criticised Electronic Arts for developing a game based on The Godfather back in 2006, including director Francis Ford Coppola. For the Electronic Arts of that time, it was business as usual – grab a popular name, a few stars and a popular genre, mix ‘em all together and watch it sell, regardless of whether said material actually fitted. While it had a few nice ideas, The Godfather wasn’t as big a success as the company had hoped in either a commercial or critical sense, so they’re going to give it another go with The Godfather II. Unfortunately, The Godfather II suffers the same issues as the first game; it’s got a couple of nice ideas, but runs out of steam a little too soon.


The Godfather II starts in Cuba, where the New York families have attempted to put aside their differences so they can divide up Cuba at the behest of Hyman Roth. However, the Cuban Revolution sours the deal (and claims the life of the first game’s protagonist, Aldo Tripani, now Don of New York) and the families go back to war. It loosely follows the setting of the second film of the trilogy, but takes a lot of liberties with the actual story. Players control Dominic, Tripani’s underboss, who is promoted to Don of New York by Michael Corleone shortly after the introductory mission.

Story has a place in The Godfather II, but it’s not a vital element – it is there more to set up the situation and give your actions context. While there are some story missions, the core of the game is more focused on managing your family; capturing new businesses, protecting the old ones, recruiting new members and putting an end to rival families. This is all accomplished via The Don’s View screen, which is basically a map of the local area, be it New York, Miami or Havana, and contains all of your vital information about who owns what and much more.

The first thing the game will command you to do is to recruit a couple of wise guys to help you out. Wise guys have a number of uses outside of acting like bullet sponges when they accompany you on jobs. Each soldier has one of a number of primary abilities like explosive, safecracking, arson, medical skills and so forth. The basic idea is that you want a team of goons that can handle all sorts of situations. Upgrades can be bought for family members with cash earned from your criminal empire, and they can be promoted at your discretion (after completing requisite story missions, of course), enabling them to gain extra abilities and become more proficient at every task. A slightly sneaky attribute associated with your thugs are weapon licenses, which are essentially randomly generated, and the only ways to upgrade them is to play the multiplayer side of the game, or kill them and replace them with a new member in the hopes he has a better license level, in which case you lose all of the upgrades you bought for them – why it can’t just be upgraded like any other attribute is beyond us. Gang member AI is satisfactory, but they have a tendency to get stuck in the scenery.


Once you’ve got a bit of a crew together, you can start taking over a few businesses to make a bit of money. This is done much the same way as it was in the first game; go to a store, kill the guards, find the shopkeeper’s weak point and persuade him to defect to you. Since you’re the Don now, you don’t have to get your hands dirty; you can send your goons out to do the dirty work via the Don’s View. They don’t necessarily get as good a deal as you can, but it comes in handy for attacking a rival family from multiple angles. Many of the businesses belong to a racket; control the racket and your family gets a bonus like more ammunition, cheaper guards or fast repairs. Think of it like a gangland equivalent of Monopoly. If you need to get rid of an opponent’s racket advantage quickly, you can bomb one of his locations and temporarily disabled said power for about 10 minutes. The Godfather II’s primary goal is to eliminate the other families, and in order to do so, you’ve got to bomb their family compound. Before you can do that, you need to take over all of their territory, which can be a pretty gruelling process.

When you first start playing The Godfather II, everything seems fresh and exciting, but after you settle into the groove, you quickly discover that the game is pretty straightforward and very repetitious. There’s a bunch of side tasks you can do like robbing banks and doing favours for regular folks or officials (you’re the Don, yet you can’t allocate these tasks to goons, so you have to get your hands dirty, which makes no sense as far as organised crime related fiction goes), which can help you dispose of opposing made men, but it always comes back to taking over the rackets.

The Godfather II features the same sort of open world gameplay as the first game when you’re on foot, but doesn’t have the same level of quality control. The world seems small, glitch-ridden and rather incomplete; the cars are all too similar and handle like crap. There’s a good variety of weapons, and beating people up is very satisfying, but after a while everything seems the same. You’ll take over rackets which seem very similar, with a very similar looking boss/shopkeeper, with the same voice as the last guy. It really starts to feel like a grind – and it’s not very challenging either. Online multiplayer provides a bit of variety, with support for up to 16 players and four different (but very standard) match types. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but you can transfer all of your gains from multiplayer into the single player side of things.


Much like its predecessor, The Godfather II doesn’t exactly shine in the visual department, but it gets its point across. The Don’s View isn’t pretty, but it’s very functional, and the interface is designed in a way to give you the information you need to know without hassles. The game world is rather sterile and lacking in detail, the player models look dated and move awkwardly, and the game struggles to maintain a consistent frame rate during heavy action sequences. EA hasn’t gone to the same extent as the first game as far as springing for the original cast goes; only a handful of actors have allowed their likenesses to be used, and only Robert Duvall voices his character.

The Godfather II provides a fresh take on the open world crime game, but the best aspects of this game wear out their welcome by the midpoint of the game. After this point, the game starts to feel like a grind, which exposes some of its big gameplay flaws. There are some fantastic ideas in this game that we’d like to see EA take further, but they really need to solidify the basic gameplay structure and presentation in order to challenge players and keep them coming back for more.