“Welcome to the Corleone Family. After a life of small-time jobsand petty thefts, you've been accepted into America's most famouscriminal organization. Now it's up to you to carry out orders, earnrespect, rise through the ranks, and make New York City your own. Playyour cards right and you could even be running everything as the next-- and most powerful -- Don.”
A story about family, respect and loyalty, The Godfather™ book byMario Puzo and film by Paramount Pictures serve as inspiration for thegame, as you join the Corleone family and earn respect through loyaltyand fear while you rise through the ranks to become Don in a living,1945-1955 New York.
Gameplay/Controls:
If you have ever played GTA (Grand Theft Auto) before, then you’lleasily master the controls of The Godfather. Sadly, there is much moreGTA to this game than just controls, but we’ll get in to that furtheron. For those of you that are not GTA proficient, your mouse controlsyour camera angle and your keyboard will give you your movementthroughout the game.
Oneof the few new features and albeit a good one, is the BlackhandControl. With this new feature you have a wide range of things you cando to people in the game. From simply grabbing a hold of a person youwant to extort and slapping them around to performing variousexecutions, you have a great deal of options at your fingertips. A wideamount of options are open to you when you engage someone. Let’s saythere is a bakery down the street that needs some good ol’ fashionedCorleone protection. You try to talk with the store owner to convincehim what a good idea it would be to have that protection. He insiststhat he doesn’t need any. Do you walk away empty handed? Of course not.Grab a hold of this insolent store owner and start smacking him around.As you do so, a meter below his name will start to fill up with bluetowards a green line. Once you get your person past the green line,he’ll be willing to pay you on a weekly basis for protection. There isnothing else required from you to maintain the protection. Just thefact that the Corleone name is associated with the business will keepother competing families away.
Smacking someone around is not the only thing you can do to peoplein the game. You can grab them and throw them in to walls or objects.Beat them to their knees and make them stand back up for more. Throwthem into furnaces and over railings. Even perform executions with neckbreaking, choking and last but not least, using firearms.
Keep in mind that meter I was telling you about. If you get themtoo far past that green line and into the red portion of the meter, youwill have pushed a person too far and they will not only not pay you your dividend, but start to attack you. Your only choice now is to put the poor sap out of his misery.
Being a new mobster and trying to prove your worth to theCorleone’s, one of the first things you’ll want to and have to do is goaround and extort business for money, just as I described above. Onceyou successfully extort a business two things will happen. You’ll earna weekly income from that business, part of which will go to theCoreleone family and part of which will go to you. That percentage isdetermined by your status in the family. The higher rank you are, themore money you get to keep. The second thing that happens is thebackdoor to the business is open which ultimately leads to youuncovering a racket. Taking over a racket is as simple as extorting abusiness with a small twist. Sometimes you can try and bribe a racketoperator and buy them out. When that doesn’t work, well you’ll makethem realize how they wish they would never have heard the nameCorleone. Rackets will also pay you a weekly income.
Takingover rackets and extorting businesses is fun for about an hour at themost. After that, it becomes very repetitive and no matter how manyBlackhand moves you want to try, nothing makes it more interesting.Each time you take over a new racket, another business or racket isplaced on your map for you to take over. This happens over and overagain, until you take over every racket and extort every business. Inmy opinion, this is a pretty cheap way to extend the gameplay hours asyou’ll need to do this in order to reach the “ultimate” title of Don ofNYC. It’s a title I never achieved and will never want to. Spendinguseless hours of my time extorting and taking over businesses doesn’tappeal to me at all.
Just as in GTA the buildings and business as well as people youinteract with quickly being to become clones of one another. This isgood or bad depending on your view. The good point is it allows makingyour way through almost any building something you could doblindfolded. The bad is just that, it gets repetitive and boring. Aprime example of this is when I destroyed the four compounds of mycompeting families. Each family has a ‘home base’ or compound, in turnwhich controls part of NYC. In order to destroy the compound, you hadto place a bomb in the basement and run out before the timer runs down.Each compound was identical.
Before we get in to the meat and potatoes of this game, there issomething else to occupy your time. Those are side missions. You canpick up hit contracts from members of the Corleone family. Hmmm…wheredid I see something like side missions before? Ah yes, GTA.
The bulk of your time should be spent playing the main missionswhich are always indicated as a blue icon on your map. Yes, your mainmap and mini map on your screen look like something you’d findin….yes…GTA. Most of the time you’ll be given one mission one after theother. If you’re ever without a mission, a quick stop at any payphonewill get you going again. The game does follow the movie perfectly. Ifyou’re a fan of the movie or even if you’re not, you’ll enjoy followingalong the storyline. The only downside to completing the main missionsis they don’t take very long to complete all of them. If you wentstraight through and finished only the main missions, you’d finish thisgame inside of eight hours. Now you can see the reason they put all thefutile side missions and extorting businesses in. It’s the only waythey could get the gameplay hours up.
The main missions themselves are pretty entertaining and you’llfind yourself either whacking someone, or racing around town to meetother members of the family and do their bidding.
All of the vehicles in The Godfather are drivable. Just like in GTAyou can “hijack” a vehicle and go where you want. Each vehicle performsa bit differently just like in….well, you know what I was going to saydon’t you? Some are fast and some are slow. Some turn well, and othersdon’t. Either way, you’ll never find yourself without access to avehicle and due to the area in which this game takes place, you’lldefinitely need to be in one ninety percent of the time when movingaround.
As you complete the main missions, you’ll earn a higher rank in theCorleone family. All the way from Outsider up to a Don. Again, if youreally must complete everything in this game (I can’t see a good reasontoo) you can become the Don of NYC. Becoming a plain ‘ol Don and havingpeople call me Godfather and kiss the back of my hand was plenty goodenough for me.
There is a variety of weapons in the game and plenty of places tobuy them if you use your map well. Anything from a .38 special, all theway up to a Street Sweeper and Tommy Gun are yours to play with. Besure to check your map often when you’re in various parts of the cityas you’ll be surprised how close you are to getting a hold of adifferent weapon.
Weaponsmake quick work of your rival family members. Keep in mind; they’re aswell armed as you are. You take out your gun, they take out theirs.They’re as willing to use theirs as you are yours. The street battlesare pretty fun to partake in and watch. Numerous times innocentcivilians get caught the cross fire and go down. In an almost comicalway you can keep a victim standing up with the Tommy Gun as long as youkeep dumping rounds in to his body.
Kill too many rival family members and you’ll start yourself a mobwar. There are two ways to end the mob war. One is to bribe an FBIagent or the other and more interesting way is to bomb the basement ofyour opposing family’s business.
As you can see, there is plenty to do with just the main missions.Again, the side missions in my view are just filler and were a waste ofmy time.
Graphics:
The first thing I saw and impressed me was the character creationscreen. Talk about customization! There is a plethora of optionsavailable to you. You can really get your character to look likeyourself or whomever for that matter. You can also change yourcharacters clothing later in the game as more clothing becomesunlocked.
The facial detail was done quite nicely in game and during the cutscenes.
Background objects and especially cars left something to be desired.
There was notable clipping with the car tires on the ground, withcharacters bodies during game play and sadly, even during cutscenes.
Overall, the visuals were adequate for the game. Nothing earth shattering or highly disappointing.
Sound:
The genre of the game as well as how the game is based off a movie,didn’t really give the developers a chance to use sound in a way thatbroke the mold.
The game had the music in it from The Godfather movie as well ashad characters with believable Italian accents and even a bit of trueItalian language in the beginning of the game.
The cars and weapons sounded pretty simple. There was an ability todistinguish from one weapon from another when listening to them.
Overall:
I honestly expected way more from The Godfather. When I firststarted playing I was telling Erik (our other admin) on how I wasenjoying the game. That quickly diminished when I realized I was simplyplaying a GTA clone with a The Godfather theme slapped over it. Thegame overall has so many characteristics from GTA that I’m surprisedEA© isn’t getting calls from Rockstar Games© on copyright infringement.
The main missions gave me roughly eight hours of gameplay and followed the movie perfectly. A definite plus there.
The side missions, extorting all business, taking over all racketsto get this silly glorified title of “Don of NYC” is utterly pointlessand a failed attempt which an decent gamer worth his salt will realize,is a pathetic attempt at extending gameplay.
The audio is perfectly fine for the game and as I mentioned, I’msure the developers had their hands tied as they were following aspecific media. The visuals are about the same. Hit or miss.
If you’re a fan of the movie, or collect everything ‘TheGodfather’, than this would be a game to add to your library. However,if GTA clones irritate you or GTA style games bore you, than this issurely something you won’t want to spend your money.
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