The Godfather II

These days, you can’t throw a nickel in a Gamestop without hitting some kind of open-world organized crime game, and EA’s first Godfather game did little to differentiate itself from the endless waves of GTA clones.

Well, EA Redwood Shores is doing things a little differently this time around, as Godfather II weaves in elements of real-time strategy (sort of) and Playboy: The Mansion-style simulation (although clearly not focused on running a softcore smut empire) along with its open world driving and shooting.

Honestly, I’m torn about this game. On one hand, it (very loosely) tackles (some of) the story of Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark series, which pegs the game as taking place around 1959. I love the setting, but the atmosphere seems unfocused and sort of slides around between the late ’50s and mid-to-late ’60s.

This is kind of endemic of the whole game itself: it’s fun, but not exceptionally well put together. The original Godfather game took some liberties with the film’s plot in order to embrace an open-world game design. OK . Godfather II takes more liberties in order to accommodate its bizarre crime-empire-sim-meets-GTA feel. That’s OK  too, I guess.

The game more or less revolves around taking by force fronts and rackets owned by other crime families, (which generally happens in shoot-out GTA-style) and then managing and defending your property from subsequent attacks (which occurs in top-down simulation style). The core system works well enough. But everything else feels kind of slapdash.

Take for instance, putting out hits on made men in rival families. You can’t just kill a made man—you have to “send a message” to his family by executing him in a particular way. In order to gather intel about how to kill these wiseguys you have to do favors for people … random people. On the street.

Now, EA could be trying to veil some social commentary about how anyone can be a criminal here, but I think it’s more likely the dev team was being lazy.

Why would a random woman who wants another random woman beaten up happen to know that in order to kill Johnny “The Sardine” Sicilian you have to choke him to death with a garrote? Doesn’t make sense. Nor does the fact that you, the new Don, have to go in and take care of every little task yourself. What happened to delegation?

Finally, the map system is almost broken. Yeah, going after little non-descript icons might’ve worked in GTA III, but things have changed now. EA could take a lesson from Chinatown Wars‘ GPS-style guidance.

To the game’s credit, the sheer amount of customization here is impressive, and if you can get past the game’s goofy and sometimes annoying inconsistencies, balancing resources and shotgunning rival gangsters is fun. It’s an offer you can refuse, but you could do worse.