Played on:
Xbox 360
When it comes to must-see mob movies, almost any movie buff will agree that The Godfather is at the top of the list. Despite a slow start, this legendary 1973 film captures the action, attitude, brutality, and overall lifestyle of the mob that we can all appreciate and love. With legendary actors like Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, and James Caan, this movie brought the talent required to really bring the drama of the mafia to life. Now, almost 35 years later, Electronic Arts has adopted The Godfather into a video game which tries to recapture the original movie's essence with all of the violence intact.
Sadly, EA has only partially succeeded. They built the game around the Grand Theft Auto style of action, where you can freely roam around, carjack anyone, and attack anyone you see in the streets, but other than the story and an admittedly large number of fairly boring side missions, there are only a few activities to do - over and over - and it will likely get tedious after a while.
The Godfather takes place in New York City in 1946, with the city broken up into five neighborhoods. You'll start out creating your new mobster with a very slick character creation system, allowing for a pretty nice range of mostly-Italian-descent gentlemen. You can even add moles and other things that give your guy some interesting bits of character, and many cutscenes during the game will allow you to see his face pretty clearly. After an interesting intro sequence that teaches you basic fighting, you'll start out as a young guy who's only barely connected to the Corleone family. Don Corleone sends Luca Brasi to rescue your character from his random acts of thuggery and bring you into the life of organized crime. The Don is voiced by Marlon Brando himself, who recorded his lines for the game before his death a couple of years ago.
You'll learn how to really fight this time - you can slam enemies against walls, throw them around, or continue holding them and just repeatedly punch them - and then Luca teaches to you one of the most important and most fun parts of The Godfather: extorting local businesses into paying protection money. There are dozens and dozens of shops all over New York, and one glance at the map makes it obvious that the Corleones are not the major players here. You'll have to start out in Little Italy, figuring out what really scares each business owner the most (smashing up their place, hurting the innocent people in the store, hitting the owners directly, aiming a gun at them, or just shoving them around a bit) and making him or her agree to a sizable payout each week. Don't push them too far, though, or they'll break, refuse to pay anything, and just fight you to the death if need be. You might also have to deal with other mob families who often consider the stores you're pressuring their turf. Sometimes they'll be standing around outside the store telling you to screw off, and other times they'll be in the back room of the store, ready to pour out when they hear a commotion out front.
Then there are the back room rackets. Some otherwise legitimate businesses will have various illegal activities going on in the back, although when you walk in it's not always obvious what the racket actually is, with a bunch of guys standing around next to some crates or something. Either way, if you kill off any hostiles, you can find the guy running the racket and buy him out - then he'll produce money for you each week. On top of this, you can help take control of the city by hijacking trucks with illegal stuff, taking over warehouses run by other mob families, and a few other bits and pieces that usually work pretty closely to the basic Racket game.
With the money you make, you can buy upgraded weapons, new apartments to save your game and lay low from the cops, or other things like Molotovs, dynamite to blow safes open with (important for when you want to go on a bank heist with your crew!), and other bits and pieces. You can also buy new clothing which actually has an effect on the game, as more expensive clothing gets you more respect. It's only a small effect overall, though. And then you also can level up as you progress throughout the game, taking over businesses and completing the story. There are five areas in which you can spent skill points from level-ups: Fighting, Shooting, Health, Speed, and Street Smarts. Each improves a specific area of your character as you add skill points, and Street Smarts gives you special abilities like stealing parked cars without any additional "Heat" from the cops or increasing your inventory capacity for explosives. All of these elements give the game more depth and make you really feel like you're a tougher and more powerful guy at later stages of the game.
It's inevitable that you're going to get into plenty of fights with rival mob families. You'll often be fighting many of them at once, but at the beginning, the game usually goes easy on you and lets you beat them down one at a time. That is, at least, until the point in the game where you can hire your own crew to roll with you and help you, and then you'll find that the difficulty increases somewhat to give you and your boys a challenge. There's also a nice arsenal of guns you can take with you and a fairly decent system that lets you stand or crouch behind cover and pop out to target and shoot specific areas of an enemy's body (while still mostly allowing you to use a pretty decent auto-target system), but you'll often find that the mob does whatever you're doing. Bringing out the fisticuffs? Get close to a guy with no weapon drawn, and he'll usually put away his gun and fight you fair. But if you pull out a gun, you will most definitely have a firefight on your hands and the enemy will hide behind cover just like you. During the early game, you'll want to stick mostly with fighting rather than shooting, but you'll quickly find that you'll get forced into plenty of firefights in the later game.
