The Godfather The Game
EA makes gamers an offer... well, you know the rest.
Published: April 10, 2006
It’s when the game lets you run around that things lose their hook. You jack cars and go anywhere, yes (and Little Italy, Hell’s Kitchen, New Jersey, Midtown and Brooklyn make a massive city to learn), but you can also run into buildings (all seamlessly available, I might add, which is impressive), extort businesses and take over rackets, pay off cops, and slowly build up your empire. Taking over the city has that same kind of Risk-style capture-and-build dynamic that made taking over gang territories in San Andreas, but it’s a little more involved here.
It’s also painfully repetitive. Unless you’re running missions to advance the storyline, you’ll likely be carrying out hits or extorting businesses to take over. Even as you advance through the ranks of the family and start taking over more of the city, you never really gain any lackeys to help, and it makes warehouse or compound raids insanely hard. Couple this with the fact that there are less than a dozen or so types of businesses (warehouses/compounds, flower shops, bakeries, printers, smoke shops, restaurants, night clubs, barber shops, etc.), and all of them magically share the same floorplan, it all starts to feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over again.
That’s not to say extortion or combat isn’t fun. You’ll rarely walk into a place, demand protection money, and get it. Usually you’ll have to rough a guy or his business up a bit, allowing you to do a little bit with grappling, which opens the door to slamming a guy’s head into a counter or up against a wall or through a window, all in an attempt to get them close to the breaking point, but not so far that they just snap and decide to try to kill you. If you win over the store, the back door is unlocked, giving you access to a safe or a racket that you can buy out (usually after dispatching the rest of the resident rival family’s gang members). This in turn gets you more cash (after the Don takes his cut, of course) at the end of the week.
Combat with fists or weapons is more or less the same; you start by locking onto and enemy and then you can shoot, bludgeon, punch (by tapping up on the right analog stick or holding back and the mashing up for a haymaker) or choke them until they get to about the halfway point on the life bar in which case you just tap R2 to execute them. If you’re in close range with a weapon, you’ll do this automatically. You can get a little creative with how you off guys too. Toss them off a roof (the same roof every time, by the way), throw them in an oven (you get a bakery or mortuary choice here), and so on.
As you take over businesses, complete hits, buy safehouses and complete story missions, you’ll gain respect, which acts as experience; gain enough and you’ll level up. With each new level, you’re allotted a point to pour into hand-to-hand fighting, weapons, health, speed or street smarts. Rather than incrementally increasing something like your hit points or the damage you do – or should I say in addition to those things – you’re awarded bonuses.
Kicking up your street smarts, for instance, lets you hot wire parked cars without taking any heat and drawing the cops’ attention. In this way, nearly every point you add to your stats actually carries a healthy bonus, which in turn motivates you to continue to level up your character. Frustratingly, you can still get gunned down by a close handgun or shotgun blast (yet your enemies rarely suffer the same fate), no matter how high your health or accuracy gets, but there are tangible updates to your character.