The Godfather 2: The Reviewening
What can I say about EA’s The Godfather 2? First of all, it has very little in common with the film of the same name. I’m of the opinion that concessions need to be made sometimes in the name of game design (like a main character who didn’t appear in the film) so I’ll overlook the bastardising of a great movie here. But keep in mind that if you go in expecting to have an experience rivaling that of the movie you will be sorely disappointed. It’s not that it’s a bad game, it can actually be pretty fun. The problem is that once the initial giddiness goes away, nothing brings it back.
The bulk of the game is made of up of tooling around with your crew putting the squeeze on various businesses. Once you take over all of a families business interests their compound unlocks and you are free to launch your assault. There are a few missions sprinkled here and there in the form of ‘kill this guy for a favour’ or ‘bust up this shop for a favour’ or the ever popular ‘talk to the guy standing next to you’ to break things up. Don’t get me wrong, this game started out as a lot of fun. I even overlooked several bugs and glitches. It just got so repetitive that I simply gave up after ten or so hours, and never picked it up again. And my understanding is that I was right at the end (I was near the end of the Cuban missions).
I can think of another game that was set in a large urban environment and had you partaking in criminal activities. You played as some Russian dude, can’t remember the name of it right now. It was pretty low key, you’ve probably never heard of it. Anyway, in that game if you got bored with the main or side missions (of which there were many) there was still a ton to do in the city. Hell, I spent loads of time just surfing the internet that Lazlow himself had a hand in creating. The point is, there are games out there that have done the sandbox crime thing a lot better than this. And they didn’t piss all over a cinema classic. If anything, Grand Theft Auto (that’s what it was, pretty indie don’t feel bad if you don’t know what it is) has moments that are more of an homage to the Godfather series than this game does.
Ultimately; this boring, repetitive, insult of a game isn’t worth playing even if you devour all things Godfather. I just hope that if they continue this series of games that they can change. That they have the strength to change.
