Review

There are many reasons why I wasn’t looking forward to playing The Godfather: 1. It seemed like a pretty cynical cash-in to the whole GTA inspired crime genre. 2. It’s the second time the iconic film series has been made into a game and the first was laughably bad. 3. The last time anyone attempted a vintage GTA the result was Mafia; 4. It’s by EA, a company who managed to squeeze e-mails into From Russia With Love despite it being set in the 60’s! 5. Even Francis Ford Coppola thought it was a very bad idea.

Well, first off, this is a major improvement on the first game, (but that wasn’t exactly hard) and vastly superior to Mafia. In it you play a small-time hood taken under the wing of the Corleone family and you can rise through the ranks by performing errands. These start in the form of roughing up shop owners to collect their protection money but it isn’t long before you’re called upon to kill key figures in rival families.

The plot runs parallel to that of the film and you’ll cross paths with all the characters from the film at one time or another. So in one early mission you’ll find yourself preventing the assassination of Don Corleone in the hospital and in another you’ll be delivering a horse head shaped package to a dodgy movie mogul.

Visually this is hugely impressive. The recreation of 40’s New York oozes atmosphere and all the characters have more expressions than I’ve ever seen in a game before. None of them suffer from the same kind of dead-eyes that usually blight such games and EA’s bottomless wallet has hired the services of Marlon Brando, James Caan and Robert Duvall to recreate their roles but the absence of Al Pacino hurts the game immensely each time Michael enters the story.

Unfortunately the developers seem to be relying on the fact that it’s The Godfather to keep you playing rather than because it’s a great game. Your initial feelings of pleasure soon fade as you realise there’s a huge amount of repetition. It only takes about 30 minutes before you start to see the same old corridors and building layouts, which is a shame as it actually plays quite well.

Hand to hand combat is handled with the right stick to dodge, punch and grapple, it feels fairly similar to the Fight Night series in its execution. The targeting, while occasionally frustrating, is at least simple and doesn’t require miraculous feats of dexterity to pull off but there are too many occasions where death is a result of the controls rather than because you lacked the skill to succeed.

So in the end The Godfather is not the unmitigated disaster I was expecting. It’s a decent, but not brilliant, interpretation of the film. There’s driving bits; there’s running and shooting bits; and there’s (surprise surprise) some sneaky stealth bits as well they all offer a moderate level of enjoyment. So in terms of the final point: Francis Ford Coppola clearly knows as much about games as he did about film when he made Jack!

About the Review

Platform

Microsoft Xbox

Developer

E.A. Redwood Shores

Publisher

Electronic Arts

Released

24th March 2006