When The Godfather: the Game was initially announced by EA, fans of the films, myself included, were instantly filled with intense feelings of dread and doom.  While certainly violent, none of the three films is an action picture or even a thriller; in fact, the Francis Ford Coppola classics are far closer to Shakespearean tragedy than anything like action exploitation.  Combine that with the fact that the vast majority of film license-based games are awful (24: the Game… UGH), and it just wasn’t looking pretty.

Fortunately, those fears turned out unrealized.  This game does nothing to besmirch the Godfather’s impressive legacy – in fact, its use of the license is arguably its greatest strength.  It’s a very good game, and, while it’s not going to win any Game of the Year awards, every gamer who is a serious Godfather fan should probably own it.

When The Godfather: the Game starts, the player is immediately demonstrated just how Godfathery this game really is.  Within minutes, you will witness a bombing followed by a merciless Tommy gun execution.  It looks like some New York Mafia big shot has gunned down a little boy’s father over some “business” interests.  Don Vito Corleone, who witnesses the murder, consoles the kid, “Let go of your anger; with time, you will have your revenge.”  The little boy is the player; fast forward 20 years or so, and the mission is clear: settle the vendetta against the backdrop of the events in the original film, and rise within the ranks of the Corleone crime family.

Yes, and…

…we shall gladly oblige these people.

You become a trusted member of the Corleones.

GAMEPLAY

The player character is nameless for obvious reasons but has a fairly well-defined personality and many voiced speaking lines, both scripted and not.  You’ll get to create your character using an impressive appearance editor, which features a huge number of options to make the character look the way you want, while still constrained to the Italian ethnicity.

Quickly, the Don sends Luca Brasi to find the player character, who is apparently a small-time crook and has no association with the Corleones, and teach him the ways of the mob.  This is basically a tutorial of the game’s mechanics, which consist of melee combat, firearm use, and making business owners offers they can’t refuse (i.e., extorting businesses and rackets, either with the threat of violence or a monetary investment).

Of these, the hand-to-hand combat is probably the freshest.  The game’s interesting melee control scheme allows to beat up your target in a number of ways that feel very authentic.  Having grabbed the opponent by clicking both the right and left mouse buttons, you can choke, punch, and drag using key presses and mouse movements.  You can slam him into walls and objects, knock him to the ground, lift him up again, and hold him out a 2^nd-story window.  You can even threaten the guy (or girl, I suppose) with a punch by winding up the mouse laterally without bringing it back – this can help during interrogations where you’d like your target to break instead of dying.  Everything feels quite intuitive, at least when using keyboard/mouse instead of a gamepad.  About the only bad thing that can be said about hand-to-hand combat is that not many opponents can really do much against a melee sequence; basically, once you’ve grabbed the guy, he’s more or less toast.

This brings us to interrogations/extortions, which are your chance to use melee techniques to non-lethal ends.  Basically, New York City is rife with businesses (some with shady backroom rackets like gambling or brothels) which you can force into paying weekly tributes to the Corleones.  The shop/racket owner has a certain pressure point at which he’s willing to give up the business for protection, and a certain pressure point at which he gets really angry and will basically just fight you to the death.  As you threaten him / his property, you want to force the pressure meter into a sweet spot between those two points, maximizing the weekly profit.  This is a cool little mini-game, but there’s not much to it, and it gets quite repetitive when one considers the number of businesses and rackets in this New York.

While you’ll be doing a sizable amount of melee combat in The Godfather, most of the punishment you’ll deal will be with guns and explosives.  The control scheme for firearms is more convoluted than it should be.  For example, the “wield” key is the same as the “reload” key, but different from the “holster” key, which is just weird and can be a big inconvenience in case you make a mistake in a mission.  The shooting itself, however, is well done, offering the option to auto-target (with the right mouse button) or manually target (by default) at will.  There is also the extremely well executed ability to take cover behind anything and take jump-out corner shots a-la Metal Gear Solid 2.  Even cooler is the mechanic which allows to slightly change the target area having locked onto a person: one can take out kneecaps, make the bad guy drop his gun, etc.  Unfortunately, the game is not hard enough to force one to make frequent use of such tricks, which is actually quite disappointing, especially for action game veterans.  This is exacerbated by the fact that, of the non-upgraded firearms, the Tommy gun is clearly by far the best in 95% of situations, which makes pistols, revolvers, and shotguns largely useless, since ammo is abundant for all weapons.

All in all, the gun combat system feels very authentic (there are even brutal custom execution styles for all of the weapons and melee techniques) but is a little too advanced for the amount of resistance the game actually throws at the player.  I would have loved this level of combat depth in the Grand Theft Auto series, where it would have felt right at home given those games’ impressive difficulty level, yet relatively clunky on-foot combat.

Speaking of Grand Theft Auto, this game follows a very similar open-ended structure (so similar, in fact, that pretty much all of the world mechanics are lifted directly from those excellent games).  While The Godfather loses points for originality, I frankly don’t see anything wrong with stealing from the best, especially given how no non-GTA game had done it successfully thus far.  It’s all here: highjack cars, shoot random people, evade cops until your heat level goes down, hide out and save in your safehouse(s), etc.  That said, this game’s New York is nowhere near close to San Andreas’s depth.  For one, it is far, far, far smaller.  Secondly, it’s basically flat and areas look and feel very similar to each other, with almost no cool landmarks or terrain features.  The cars lack personality (though they can go quite fast and do handle very nicely).  Finally, and most importantly, The Godfather simply lacks the mission variety of the Grand Theft Auto games.  Not only is it a much shorter game, the missions – which are quite fun – are also fairly repetitive.  Basically, there are four types of mission objectives: kill, stealthily kill, drive from A to B while under pursuit, interrogate.  Of course, this can describe lots of games, but The Godfather just doesn’t make each mission feel very different from another.  Any kind of non-mission free-roaming to do here is just not entertaining – if you decide to go on a GTA-like rampage, the chase the cops will give you is a far cry from the FBI/army/police onslaught you might expect if you are a GTA fan.  Thus, while the game might appear like a free-form experience, in reality it’s quite objective-based, if non-linear – quite unlike Grand Theft Auto, which is much more of a virtual sandbox if you want it to be. Gameplay: an above-average 8.

Not exactly Final Fantasy, but…

Showing off the impressive fire effects.

An atypically wide-open view of New York.

STORY AND REPLAY VALUE

While the game’s New York City is sizable, it is, of course, really about the size of maybe one Manhattan neighborhood, and this includes the game’s “Little Italy,” “Brooklyn,” “Midtown,” and “New Jersey.”  The main story mission sequence will take most about 10 hours to complete, resulting in the rank of Underboss.  That’s not long, but the mission variety here doesn’t warrant a longer story.  What’s cool, though, is how cleverly integrated into the film’s storyline the missions are.  Even wonder who roughed up those punks that beat the undertaker’s daughter in the film?  How about the guy that planted the gun for Michael to use in the murder of Solozzo?  What about the fate of Bruno Tattaglia who was responsible for Luca’s death?  The player takes a most active role in all of these engagements and many more.  In fact, the game recreates many of the film’s memorable conversations and scenes, such as the Don Corleone assassination (oranges and all), in-engine.  It’s really quite ingenious and holds up well to the Godfather legacy.  Unfortunately, towards the end of the story missions, this accuracy peters off a bit, eventually just narrating certain key events with a simple text prompt instead of using them for dramatic impact.  Some missions also differ from the film in ways that are less than convincing but done for the sake of gameplay (Michael hanging out of the passenger-side window and perforating the pursuing cars with gunfire? I don’t think so!).  It’s nothing major, but it is unfortunate that the entirety of the story missions couldn’t be as well integrated into the film as the first ten or so.  I also wish the revenge plotline was resolved with as much dramatic impact with which it was initiated in the opening cutscene.

Finishing the game’s story missions is roughly equivalent to only 25% of the completion score.  There is much more to do, and it’s facilitated by the game’s surprisingly involved stats system; as you gain experience points (“respect”) by killing/extorting/etc., you can pay skill points into abilities such as shooting, fighting, and interrogating.  Developing these stats makes post-Underboss activities much easier.  You will be able to become Don Corleone by bombing all 4 rival families’ compounds, which isn’t too hard to do after upgrading the Tommy gun on the black market (the Dillinger will cost you $500,000, but it’s worth every penny).  Doing that, taking over all the rival hubs/warehouses, and extorting all the businesses/rackets will make you Don of New York, but the stultifying repetitiveness of this is strictly for completists, and I’m not one of them.  There are other fun things to do, such as embarking on a series of assassination missions (e.g., bomb this guy, garrote that guy, fry this guy in a crematorium, etc.), robbing banks, holding up trucks – in short, all the things a real mobster is likely to do on a daily basis.  There are some throwaway bonuses, such as collecting film clips from the DVD, as well.  All told I’d say the average player will spend 15 or so hours on this thing and put it on the shelf, but if desired, the game can last maybe double that. Replay value: an average 7.

GRAPHICS AND SOUND

In terms of visuals, I will use Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas as a reference point, since it’s the closest thing to this game in terms of open-ended graphics.  I gave SA an 8/10 a year ago, with its strengths being the art design and sheer scope of the world, brought down by a very dated look technically speaking.  The Godfather is far better technologically; it has very nice fire and particle effects, great facial animations, and far better textures and polygon counts for everything.  In the art department, however, it is quite weak.  This New York is somewhat realistic style-wise, I suppose, but it is very ugly and flat and none of the neighborhoods has any personality, with emotionless and samey-looking gangsters and civilians, which contrast strongly with New York’s vivid depiction in The Godfather Part II.  Other than a generic day-and-night cycle, there are no beautiful sky/sun/fog/weather effects, and there is no sense of context for this New York, which feels closed in and limiting, with few back-alley secrets or fascinating denizens beyond the stereotypes of “corrupt cop” and “skimpy-clothed prostitute.”  The enemy models and building interiors are maddeningly repetitive (for example, all four rival family compounds’ layouts are exactly the same as the Corleones’ own).  In addition, the draw distance is really, really terrible to the point that it seriously affects driving gameplay.  These flaws are somewhat offset by a solid locked 30-fps frame rate on our test machine (6800GT, Athlon 64 3400+, 1GB RAM), but, generally speaking, the game looks just average.  Graphics: 7.

On the other hand, the sound here is well handled.  James Caan (Sonny Corleone), Robert Duvall (Tom Hagen), and frighteningly effective impersonators of Vito Corleone and Pete Clemenza do a fine job with the story dialogue; they’re joined by various key supporting actors from the film, including Abe Vigoda and John Martino.  Al Pacino refused to lend his voice or likeness to the film, probably out of respect for Francis Ford Coppola who disapproved of the project, but this is probably just as well, since he sounds nothing like the Al Pacino of the early 70s, anyway, and it would have been very difficult to properly imitate his stunning performance in the film.  That aside, not only is the acting top-notch, the dialogue, even when not lifted from the film, strikes just the right notes.  The music doesn’t disappoint, as both the film’s unforgettable theme and a few original compositions set the atmosphere perfectly.  Unfortunately, the sounds of the city leave something to be desired – they are quite repetitive, and the theme song is used far too often – causing me to give the sound a 9 rather than a 10.

Sonny’s just as painfully bullheaded as in the film.

Crude, but effective.

Wouldn’t be The Godfather without a love story.

FINAL SCORE

This is a complex game, and it has the added onus of having to live up to the legacy of the greatest film of all time (don’t argue with me; it is the greatest film of all time, period!).  While it does the latter mostly with great aplomb, its attempt to imitate the open-ended greatness of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas just hasn’t gone quite as smoothly.  This game is certainly far above average, and it is definitely the only game in the non-fantasy virtual sandbox genre that’s anywhere close to GTA’s level of excellence, but EA will have to pour a bit more money and talent into the sequel to score a true megahit the next time around.  I, for one, am awaiting that next game with great anticipation, as I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go watch The Godfather and its sequel for the 1,223^rd time. 8.0/10