The Godfather II (Xbox 360) Review

The Godfather movies are legendary, some of the best movies of all time and for any game to go under that title they have some massive shoes to fill – which the first Godfather game failed to fill. And now they are attempting to take on Godfather II, but how good is the game? Well, read on to find out.

Godfather II is set in the late 1950’s and very early 1960’s in 3 different cities, including Cuba, New York and Florida where you play as a guy who goes by the name of Dominic Corleone – who’s appearance you can change straight away to how you think a up and coming mob boss should look like (I went with the usual; make him look like as much of an asshole as possible style.)

The games story starts of in Havana, Cuba at a mafia meeting with 4 dons; Aldo Trapani (don of New York City), Hyman Roth, Rico Granandos and Samuele Mangano. After an attack by Cuban revolutionists, shit hits the fan and all hell breaks loose in Cuba, you are then set the task to escort the 4 dons to the airport so they’re able to escape the country and return to New York. When arriving at the airport, you are ambushed and Aldo is killed by a Cuban sniper and he then promotes you (Dominic) to the Don of New York City.

When arriving in New York City, this is where the game really kicks off and shows you the newest feature; Don’s View. The Don’s View is a 3D map where you can send your fellow mobsters to attack or defend specific targets, but be careful! As this game is a open world mob game, there is police everywhere… and are an absolute bitch to try and escape from. Plus, you can do a variety of other things from this menu such as organize your mob, buy upgrades for your family like there special skills. Your mob are essential to progressing through the game, as there are 5 specific skills in the game which you hire your mobsters for, these being; bruiser, arsonist, safe cracker, engineer, demolitions and medic. Each being needed to do different things; bruisers are able to break down certain doors and are good at fighting while the medics are fairly weak but are able to revive you and your team mates when you’re killed. And as you could have guessed, each one of these AI controller mobsters which stalk you is as useless as they come, managing to get stuck on the smallest things or simply not listening to the commands you give them (follow and move to), as your goons are incredibly important to progress through the game as there skills are needed, it makes the incredibly repetitive missions even more tedious because of the piss-poor AI. And as you never know what skills you will need when you try to overtake a crime ring or blow up a stronghold, you can sometimes end up waiting 10 minutes for your new guy to arrive as it seems he got stuck in traffic on the way.

The upgrades can also affect anything from the amount of health you and your mobsters will have, how quickly there health will recover, improving there specific skills by making perform the skill faster, how accurate they are with one or two handed weapons or even upgrading the weapons they can actually use. There are a decent variety of weapons within the game which you can carry around with you (unfortunately nothing with big explosions) such as; hand guns, assault rifles, shotguns, magnums, melee weapons and sniper rifles, each having 3 major upgrades to them, the upgrades being a completely different weapon within that specific type of gun. The best example being upgrading from the Tommy gun which is a level 1 machine gun to an AK-47 assault rifle once you’ve found the machine gun upgrades which are also hidden around the 3 cities. Plus, each weapon have there own incredibly brutal execution move, which usually involves putting your opponent to his knee’s and unloading all 6 bullets of the magnum into the back of there head.

As you progress through the game you’ll start to take over your rival mafia gang’s crime rings which range from whore-houses to chop shops driving from building to building in the sorry excuse of cars, which turtles could beat in a race, extorting each one of the owners by finding what there scared of using the old trial and error method which you were taught in Mathematics while you were still a young whipper-snapper at primary school. There are 3 benefits to taking over the crime rings; the first being it’s the only way you can progress through the single player mode, the second being you’re given money each day by the crime ring owners for your ‘protection’ and the last reason being if you control all of one specific type of business you and your hired goons are given major bonuses – the best example of this being if you control all of the chop shops in the gain you’re given access to the armoured cars which you see constantly but are given the same god-damn message saying your not allowed access to the car, You’d think that a Don would at least know how to pick a car lock really. He’s able to control whole countries crime rings, but he can’t pick a damn lock… Another upgrade which is available in the game is the bullet-proof vests which are

When you’ve overtaken so many of the crime rings in a specific region (New York City, Florida and Cuba) you’ll then be able to try and take out the family who’s crime rings you have over taken, you’ll become aware of when your able to do this because the game practically screams it at you by putting a huge pop-up on the screen. You take out the family by fighting your way through the stronghold, taking out the family’s captains and lieutenant (taking out the ‘made men’ before hand makes things much easier, trust me) to get to the furthest back point of the stronghold and plant a bomb on something which looks incredibly similar to gas tank which they didn’t want to put somewhere safe. Once planted, the simplest way to put it is run for your life as you only have 30 seconds to escape from being blown to small mafia chunks and 30 seconds isn’t a lot of time when the buildings are like fun-house mazes.

Final verdict

The potential behind the Godfather II video game is enormous, yet it struggled to crawl over the first hurdle, that being making an enjoyable game throughout and a good amount of variety from mission to mission. I understand that there is only so much you can do in an open world mafia game and for the first hour or so of the campaign I was really enjoying it, but when every single fucking mission is exactly the same as the last, the game starts to become more of a chore than something you actually want to play.

Find more Godfather II reviews over at Test Freaks!

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