by: John Olin

March 21, 2006

It was something I was totally uneasy about, I loves me some movies, and when one of my favorite movies is optioned as a videogame it better be damn good. Well, as luck would have it, the game turned out to be a rare jewel. As the game begins, you see the Paramount mountain roll on the screen, followed by the familiar Godfather Waltz performed by Nino Rota, then rolling to a start page with a black and white illustration of Don Vito Corleone played by Marlon Brando. Immediately you are sucked into the game from the beginning and you are in for quite a long ride as well. You begin as a young boy; a witness to your fathers demise by the hands of mafia thugs, then The Godfather, Vito Corleone takes you in under his wing.

You then go into Mobface, a customization palette that lets you choose the look of your gangster, to his face, to the way he dresses. When you are done with that you are thrust in the universe of The Godfather movies made by Mario Puzo decades ago. As soon as you begin you will come to realize the game moves a lot like the GTA series, mixed with a bit of the Fight Night games in terms of controls, and of course, unlike GTA it has an obviously better story. Like GTA, you are able to go on missions, or just roam around, but for me personally I really wanted to go on more missions than just roam around. The game can get a bit tiresome at times, especially in the beginning, where it requires you to constantly hassle store clerks to start paying you out for protection, but all in all it is kept fresh, especially through the incredible story of the Godfather. Imagine though, that you are in the Godfather movie, one of the guys just off to the side, or one of the guys who are “giving an offer that said person can’t refuse”? This is you.

Controls can take some getting used to but they are actually fairly simple. Uses the right trigger, with the right analog as the action button for melee attacks, you can cycle through your weapons with direction pad left, right, equip/reload up and pressing down puts gun away. An interesting innovation with controls is that if you press in both triggers, you grab the person you are attacking, allowing you to hold them down while you pummel them. Even better, is if you press in all the buttons on the pad at the same time, as if you are squeezing down on their neck, you will feel a rumble in the controller like a pulse, which will slowly die down until they are dead. The only bad thing about the controls is that the developers make it a bit difficult on you, so that you don’t get careless and try and go on killing sprees. The setups is a bit complicated, and say you select a gun and use it all up, instead of automatically switching to your next weapon, it requires you to select the weapon yourself.



The extortion system used in the game so that you can control a business is also pretty interesting, and quite fun, despite it can become a problem, or tiresome at times. When you do it, you come to the business owner, and threaten them a bit, and by a meter in the upper right hand corner, you can tell how scared they actually are. After a certain point, they will crack. Before that, you bang up their shop, cash register, anything to get them scared out of their minds. Once to a certain point on the meter they will give in, and begin to pay you out. A lot of times you have to deal with rival families, so before you can even extort them, you have to pay off cops or FBI to help clear them out. Cops are normally easy to find, and they will mostly only be able to be paid out enough so that they leave you alone. The FBI can be a bit hard to find, and in many cases it can take quite awhile to find them. Another interesting thing about the game is, if you screw with a rival family, or a mob family in general, then they screw with you. As you enter certain areas, you will see how much of a Vendetta they have against you, and if you take their businesses, or kill their men, that level goes up. In the beginning, they may only hassle you. Then they will start shooting, and then eventually they may even create roadblocks! It can get to be pretty interesting and challenging as well.

The game does borrow a lot from GTA, but to say it is borrowing from GTA, is like saying, all platformers are a rip-off of Super Mario Bros. Something had to invent the free-roaming 3D world action genre, and GTA did just that, so to say that the game rips it off, well would be stretching it. While it borrows much of the ideas from the GTA series, it is hard to reinvent something, and I think the developers probably expected people to assume it was going to be something like GTA anyways. Still, despite as much as it borrows from GTA, it is definitely far harder, and you want to actually go through the story, especially if you are a huge fan. Another thing that you notice as you play the game, and begin to take for granted is you can actually go into a lot of buildings, something you really can’t do in to many other free roaming games, and something that is done with absolutely no load times. Not only that, these levels are multi-tiered, and pretty well detailed, some of which resemble areas you may have seen in the Godfather movies.