The Godfather II

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Here's the situation, I have played GTA4 all the way thru. This is the 4th day of playing Godfather II, did not play the 1st one. This is obviously a similar game to GTA, it's not as deep, but the focus on action does make it a nice play 1 hour here & there game.

Character creation: It's fairly detailed, you can customize the look any way you want. The one thing I didn't get is you get to choose 7 or 8 styles of clothing, but you end up only wearing only 1. There's formal, casual, sporty, etc, thought you would be able to change it up in the game. So far, don't see it.

Fighting: This is more action oriented than GTA. Just a few hours into the game, already got all the available guns. There's plenty of ammo, plenty of reloads, and the health meter regenerates fast. The hide & aim controls aren't as tight as GTA, easier to just run in and gun em down. Maybe in the later stages it gets harder.

Driving: The controls are identicle to GTA, so that was easy to learn. Each unique car doesn't feel as different, but back in the 40's, maybe that's just the way the cars are.

Camera: This gave me a bit of trouble. When running around in the room, the camera can't keep up, often ends up in bad angles, and you have no idea who is shooting you. Fortunately you have plenty of health and it regenerates fast enough you have time to take a few shots and look around.

Voice / Music: The voice acting and music is fine. I'm one of the few that didn't watch Godfather all the way thru, so can't really comment on how it compares to the movie. Playing this game already made me buy the blue-ray Godfather set and plan to watch it this weekend.

Missions: The missions are a bit more dull than GTA. Although the main idea is the same, it's either driving or killing, GTA does make it much more sophisticated. In here, you basically go in the place, kill most guards, find owner ( this can get frustrating as some are hard to find due to the bad camera), take over, defend. The variation comes in the way you kill. Some nice finish move animations.

Control: One thing I must point out is this game lacks JUMP! Some obstacles gets really frustrating when there is a tiny little ledge and you can't jump over it. Yes, it does have a vault in some areas, but it can't be used everywhere. Otherwise, this game's controls are about the same as GTA, so if you played GTA, it'll be easy transition.

Overall: For the casual gamer, this is fine. It's not that hard, pickup & play for a hour, a bit repetitive but still fun. I'm not good at FPS, prefers RPGs / Strategy games, so this game suits me good. Has RPG / Strategy elements, and the action is easy enough for me to handle. For hardcord gamers this might be too easy / repetitive. Still, even if you don't buy, it deserves at least a rental to try it out.

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Sometimes anticipation for a much awaited game can make me put thrift aside and go for the impulse buy. It happened with Scarface, and here we are all over again.

Godfather II exemplifies this experience. In all honesty, if I had waited to read the user reviews here I would not have purchased the game new right off the bat for $60. I would have waited for a used copy or rented it when I was home sick with the flu. Lesson learned.

Overall the game has major problems. I don't compare it so much to the movie as I do to the first Godfather on PS2. The biggest flaw is a general sense of repetition and a lack of creativity.

Pros:

*I like the crew aspect and the AI is very good on your crew members. Makes for a nice strategy.

*Molotovs make for an amazing fire display during heated battles

*Despite it's flaws it does offer compelling and downright addictive gameplay. You take over one business and you just want more, more, more!

*I like being able to customize all the wardrobe details

*Cuba offers a very unique game play setting with stone buildings and military police checkpoints

*Some of the businesses (i.e. oil rig) offer very cool layouts

*Shooting and aiming is user friendly, similar to GF I

CONS (and there are a lot):

*Awkward screen controls. XY axis is hard to control the view angle.

*Frustrating vertical mazes do not equal challenging puzzle play. Just trying to maneuver around is constantly thwarted by not being able to jump off of a surface or get over a low barrier. If a window if 3 feet high you can vault it but if it's 3.4 feet high you have to go 300 feet to get around?

*GF I offered repetitive business takeovers and compounds, but these were offset by interesting missions and some difficulty in opponents. Missions here are just lame. There's no challenge, no strategy, no puzzle to figure out, just find 'em and off 'em. Opponent AI is just too easy with no ability to adjust difficulty level.

*Driving is too much like real life--it's a slow, tedious way to get from one place to another rather than part of the game itself. There are no interesting chases, races or getaways.

*You have to play online to upgrade your weapon license. It's one thing to offer perks for online play, but to make it necessary for completion? Essentially if you don't have high speed internet (doesn't everyone?) you have to off your crew members as you go along to get new ones who use better weapons. Some omerta! Very uncool.

*Too short! I finished the anticlimactic finale in 3 days. And the game has very little replay value.

*Movie scenes are more about exposition than moving your character's story line along. I understand it's a game not a movie adaptation, but when the source material is this good and the first game stuck so close to the movie, there is an expectation for a certain level of authenticity that is lost by this much straying.

*Dying or getting arrested has no real penalty. You don't lose your stuff or much money and you just go right back to where you left off. Although in theory this sounds great, what it does is lower the stakes to where you just don't care so much if you live or die, in essence ruining the excitement and/or suspense and muting any victories attained.

*Every moment of the game is dominated by a sense that it could have been so much more. If I can think of it, the programmers should have too. Which makes me think that this was just a rush to production to coast off of the previous title and the moview with no true attention to quality and innovation.

Buy The Godfather II Now

Godfather 2 is a great game if you can get past the average graphics and voice acting. The main goal of Godfather 2 is taking control of New York, Miami, and Havana from rival Mafia families one business at a time. Godfather 2 is very addictive because you want to keep taking over businesses as you watch your territory grow. You hire a crew of 3 people, each with their own speciality (lock picking, medic, etc). You also get to upgrade their stats like an RPG, and you can buy them better weapons that you unlock in the game. It may not be pretty, but for 20 bucks you can't go wrong.

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I purchased the Godfather Don's edition for the PS3 many years ago, and, had many fun play-throughs of that game. This game was highly anticipated.

I bought this game from Amazon, then made the mistake of selling it back to Amazon. I actually bought this game again and played through it a few more times.

Games like this that are fun, don't have any multi-player capabilities and provide many hours of fun are the kinds of games I like. There aren't that many games that keep me busy after beating it the first time. This game is one of them.

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The final word here is, thin on substance, but still remarkably fun to play. As in the first game, you play a character who was never in the movie, yet somehow you're an integral part of the story, which is a little bothersome if you're hoping for an authentic Godfather-type experience. But the original was also disappointing in this respect, wasn't it? More filler scenes are invented this time (many of which are highly improbable). But if you can put the screenplay issue aside? The game is actually a lot of fun -GTA like, except without the autos. The main task is to build a criminal empire up (just like in the first one) using all the tools and tricks of the trade -threats, bribery, sabotage, and (of course), just plain old shoot-em-up-style violence. And you are allowed to choose the kind of leader you want to be. Do you want to hedge your bets, stockpile your assets, and then send in your crew to take over a rival business? Or just go in yourself with nothing but a handgun and your wits and blow the place apart? Do you want to take out an enemy family quickly, with the minimum amount of fuss, or weaken them slowly by picking off their made men and bombing their businesses? It's just fun to decide these things.

The combat system is also not as one-dimensional as some others, and in some respects is even better than GTAs. For example, if a guy really irritates you, you can take your time in sending him into the next world -thus also proving a point to any remaining enemies. You get bonuses for throwing a guy off a roof, or beating him with a melee weapon -yeah, brutal, but fun. Really fun. Not just aim, fire, repeat until no one's moving anymore. There's some thought required before you directly attack a business, or compound; again, also found in the original, but expanded on here. If, for example, the owner has hidden himself behind a locked fence with his goons, and you have no one to cut through the wire to let you in, you can't take over -you can only make the opposing family angrier.

The driving system, however, is terrible. No improvement over the original. You scrape one guy's bumper, and it seems to take a minute just to get rolling again. Not fun to tool around New York, Miami, or Havana. Mostly just aggravating.

The map was fine in the first game -this one, though it's three dimensional and gives you more information, really just reminds you that the whole gaming world here is much, much smaller than in the original. If you really try, you could probably even finish this game in a day.

The "killing Castro" mission felt promising at first, even exciting, but the player is shortchanged in the end: no matter how perfectly he plays it, he cannot kill Castro. I shot him with a rifle directly in the head, and still it triggered the cutscene where he just gets up and shakes it off. So what is the point of all the painstaking sneaking?

The over-the-top violence here is just as unapologetic as in the first game. You can play your character just as bad as you want. Or be the good guy in a bad business, if you prefer.

But the best aspect of this game is how you're allowed to evolve -more money, more skills, more weapons, more family members, more businesses, more "rackets," until you're practically unstoppable. And this building-up process is FUN, something the folks at Rockstar still don't fully appreciate, at least in my opinion.