The Godfather The Game
EA makes gamers an offer... well, you know the rest.
Published: April 10, 2006
Redundancy aside, it is rather impressive how much of a seamless experience driving around 1940s New York is. The draw distance is great, there’s a decent variety of shops and locales from the movie that aren’t necessarily used in cutscenes, even the textures for the buildings are nice.
Papers and debris blow around everywhere, street lights explode in a shower of sparks, cars explode with concussive force, and boxes and carts explode in a shower of splintered wood, and all of it is done with a good, solid framerate most of the time. Sadly, there’s a severe shortage of car variety. I can’t even think of more than a half-dozen different types off the top of my head, and only one of them, the bullet-shaped vehicle, is worth a damn for getting from one side of the city to the other. At least the physics model is so good that you can actually drive a car up the side of another car if the slope is right.
EA spent quite a bit of time motion capturing actors and animating things so that they matched up with the scenes in the movie closely, and for the most part they are very good for character, but during close-ups they can pop from one face to the next – particularly with Don Corleone in the scene where he finds out Sonny is dead.
In fact, the faces in general are a little sketchy, not because they don’t look like the movie counterparts (save for Pacino’s Michael, so neither his face nor his voice match up to what’s seen in the movie), but because the textures used can tend to look a little low-res and dirty. The same problem plagues most of the faces in The Getaway. It’s a minor gripe, but still there.
The same goes for some of the tertiary voice acting, which, again is recycled from shopkeeper to shopkeeper or racket to racket. The rest of the voices – even the person used to impersonate Brando – do a great job, and there are some very, very well-done lines from both Robert Duvall and James Caan. The gunshots, from pistols to tommy guns to shotguns, all have throat and meat to them, though some of the punches and the overall engine noise isn’t terribly lively.
Nino Rota’s score is well represented here – perhaps a little too much, as the main theme gets recycled about once every five minutes, but it’s nevertheless a great tune, and all the rest of the music in the game is equally solid if a bit overused at times.
And that right there is the guiding theme for the game: solid, if a bit overused at times. Sure, there’s an innate draw for me to games that allow the character to grow and become more powerful, and the almost obsessive fascination with taking over every territory to eventually become the Don of New York led me to a game that was probably twice as long (if not a little more) than the main story missions that mirrored the film. If nothing else, that the game was able to hold my interest for those 20 or so hours means it was a worthwhile venture.
I still can’t shake the feeling that the overall feeling of the city, despite all the stuff going on in it, just doesn’t have any life. Sure you can mug anyone you want, toss ‘em in front of a moving car, jack said car and tear ass down Broadway, but something’s missing. It’s not a huge deal, since there’s plenty to distract you from it all, but I do feel it needs mentioning, even if it’s just me.
The Godfather manages to do the very thing most thought it couldn’t. It does the film justice, working you into the storyline in a convincing way and then leaving you with just as much to do after the movie is over. For that EA is to be commended, particularly the Redwood Shores studio, which I never thought would get it together. For everyone, this should be a rental, and for many, it’ll be good enough to buy. Offer accepted.