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The life and work of a Don is never easy.  You seem to constantly be at war with rival families.  You travel between cities and countries endlessly.  You always seem to have to steal your latest mode of transportation.  And most of all, you never seem to look fashionable, but more like a lifeless display mannequin.  While Godfather II, is fun at times and tries some new things that work really well, it ends up unraveling as it reaches mid-point, leaving gamers scratching their heads as to why they went this route.

The Godfather II starts off with a great setup, with your main man from the first game meeting an untimely demise in Cuba, and Dominic, your character in the sequel being elevated to take over the reins of the New York arm of the Corleone family.  For the first time, you actually have a feeling of power, as you need to assemble a family, and expand your empire.  You are no longer the lone army of the family, but the head of a criminal organization and this change adds a lot to the gameplay of Godfather II.

Shortly after starting Godfather II, you will find yourself in the Don’s View menu.  Hitting the Tab button brings The Don’s View up, and it gives you a complete overview of your criminal empire.  You can see the entire city that you are in at the time, who owns what, how many guards are protecting a business and a lot more.  You can also get a lot of supplemental information from here, including your family structure, upgrades, rackets owned, heat on your organization and tons more.  You can even assign the bombing of bases and the takeover of businesses from this view.  While it is RTS/RPG lite, it does make you feel like you are managing the family.

Godfather II has an underlying story that intertwines with the second movie of the same name.  At certain points you find yourself performing missions for Michael Corleone and his associates, including Hyman Roth.  The story is very involving, taking you to Cuba, New York and Florida, managing an empire, while performing duties for Michael Corleone.  The story changes a few plot points from the movie to the game, to make it fit into The Godfather II storyline, but it is a pretty good story.

Beyond the story, you are tasked with expanding the family empire across the three cities.  Your tasks come down to taking over businesses, bombing businesses and currying favor with certain people around town to either get special bonuses or learn how to take down a rival made man.  Taking over a business is as easy as storming the building, and killing off the guards.  While there are several points of entry to any business, you will find that you never have to worry about taking damage as you constantly regenerate health after taking cover, and the enemy AI is not all that great.  They shuffle from side to side and take cover occasionally, but at other times, they just randomly walk into a stream of Tommy-gun fire without thinking twice about it to advance their position.

Introduced in Godfather II are perks, which are gained by owning a complete racket of businesses.   If you control all of the pawn shops, you end up gaining bulletproof vests for your crew.  Own all the prostitution rings and you get a bonus on the money that you collect.  Each business racket gives you a bonus and it is a great incentive to keep you going after a targeted segment of businesses.  Some of the bonuses are throwaways, but most really do give you something that can be useful for continuing your crime spree through the three areas in the game.

As you may notice from the screenshots, the game is an average looker at best.  For a game that came out in 2009, it does not even match up to the first game.  I felt that the graphics in the first Godfather game stood up better than the ones in Godfather II.  Up close some of the character models look good, but it is not that often.  Also, the environments just look so bland and generic.  I mean each area has a look that captures the style of the local, but you drive around and noticed that most buildings look the same.  There also seems to be a lack of life in any of the characters.  I never felt attached to anyone this time around, because they all seemed so stiff and without appeal.  Also, there were a ton of clipping issues, including the picture above that shows off the weeds in the grass that are sprouting out of the trunk of my car.  Enemies will sometimes have limbs coming through the doors which really should not be happening in this day and age.  It just seems like with the resources of EA Redwood Shores and with a license like The Godfather; you would have the best in graphics, not low to average.

Voiceover work is another place where you get some good and some bad.  While Robert Duvall puts in some great work as Tom Hagen, he sometimes seems distracted or lax in his delivery.  Hyman Roth also had some good work, but the rest of the cast was average at best.  I mean I kept listening to Michael Corleone and I just could not wait for his segments to end, as he was just so dull and uninteresting.  And your crew will drive you insane with the same half dozen to dozen quips that they say while they are driving or walking with you.  I can relate if you decide to send your crew members off to buildings so they will leave you with some peace and quiet.  I did it more than once.  I did enjoy the background music, and I wished there would have been a bigger variety.  The score had some great tunes that were very catchy.

The Godfather II suffers from several big issues that take away a lot from the game.  For one, no matter what kind of cover you take, it is indestructible.  It sounds fair enough on the level, but take this example: If I hide behind an outdoor table and chair and I can still see half your body sticking out, I should be able to shoot the parts of your body sticking out.  Instead, bad programming has made the entire area a shield, meaning that bullets cannot hit anything behind the item, including the areas that you can see through the cover.  There’s nothing like using up half a clip of ammo to know that the person has to come out from behind anything in order to be hit, no matter what their cover item.  Also, the game inadvertently minimized to the taskbar on several occasions during gameplay, and it minimized to desktop every time the game started up.  The first instance is huge as it can happen in the middle of a battle; the latter is just an inconvenience.  Also, it is just unstable at times, jerking along for no reason, as the game is not that graphically intense.  It looks like the game has been patched on several occasions while I have been reviewing it, but none of them seem to have done anything.

The biggest problem however, is the cheap extending game mechanic that happens about midway in the game.  No matter what you do, you will get set back to almost square one, and it is irritating as you have no real way to combat what happens at the six to seven hour mark.  I was seriously  irritated and the mechanic reminded me of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas where you conquer your territory, only to get run out of town and lose all the work you had done up to that point.  It is a cheap way to extend the game and it was at this point, I just lost complete interest in The Godfather II.  Sure there were some good story points where you intersected the movie after this, but I just did not care as I had been completely taken out of the game.

There is multiplayer support and Dons View multiplayer should be patched in soon, but right now, there are a limited amount of players out there to match up with.  You can bring cash that you earn in the game into multiplayer and put it on the line, which adds to the multiplayer modes, because you have a vested interest in playing to the best of your abilities.  I will try to do a supplemental review of the multiplayer after I can get a few more rounds in on it, but so far it is limited at best.

The Godfather II starts off fresh, and the Don’s View adds a new layer that provides a bit more depth to the traditional sandbox game experience.  The main storyline is also very well done and intersects into movie plot on several occasions.  However, average graphics that look a few years old, a reset mechanic in the middle of the game, and a host of glitches, bugs and lazy programming add to an average game at best.  The Godfather II gets 2.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

Check out The Godfather II and other PC reviews at Test Freaks.