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In EA’s Godfather for the XBox, you can, should, and will:
- Rob banks
- Get “respect” from hookers
- Hang out with the Corleone Family
- Get vengeance for “the family”
- Execute villains in more than 20 different ways
- Pay off the fuzz (the cops)
- Yell out “Toasty” when you douse some fools in a well thrown Molotov Cocktail
- Bomb safes
- Blow off kneecaps
- Extort all of New York
- Mostly enjoy the 20+ hours of wreaking havoc
Playing through Godfather, I have come to the following conclusion: shooting people in the head is a lot of fun.
Murder 1000 people in various ways:
- Run over them
- Throw them off bridges
- Beat them into submission with your fists
- Easy-bake them in pizzeria ovens
- Choke them
(I hope no one quotes this blog in a study of video game violence.)
Godfather is what everyone will surely describe as Grand Theft Auto with a Godfather skin. This is fairly correct- if you can play GTA, you can pickup Godfather as well. However, these games are usually described more as “sandbox” games, games that you can basically mold your own experience. Incidentally, I never had a sandbox when I was a kid, so I’m not sure what that means for this review.
Godfather, to me, though, doesn’t feel like a true free-form sandbox experience. You have an open world, you can drive around, do anything at any time (you can do a story based mission, or you can try other side missions, like taking extorting a business, or becoming a murderer-for-hire), but the missions themselves are very linear. Often, you’ll have missions which may have two or three parts to them, but in each part, pretty much every player has to do the same thing- there really aren’t options for stealth or sniping or creative methods; instead, you just need to get in there up close and kill, with the only option being what weapon you want to use. Missions will have bonuses that tell you exactly what you need to do, so there’s no creativity in how you do it, and little reason to try to be.
I wouldn’t say this is such a negative, I enjoyed the game regardless.
The game takes place in the time of the first Godfather movie. You’re a new recruit to the Corleone gangster family, and you go through the game trying to prove your loyalty and capabilities. You’ll be able to name yourself (but you are always a man) and create a custom look among a myriad of fashion options, but no matter what you’ll probably always look stylish, like any respectable gangster would. The type of missions you’ll see are what you’d expect if you’ve watched any Mafia movie. You do what they do. Extort. Murder. Talk to cops. Beat up people. Hang out in casinos.
The biggest draw to the game for most people will be the tie-in to the movie universe. You not only meet the characters (excellent character models) and hear old (from the movie) and new recorded footage from the real actors (except for Al Pacino), you’ll also participate in many of the key story sequences from the movie. This is where Godfather really excels in comparison to other movie property games. The integration of the movie and the game world is very well done, the missions here make a lot of sense and seem realistic within that frame. That means that you could actually add the Godfather game to the movie storyline, and the plot would still work. This is rarely the situation with other movie games, which will add pointless sequences related to the movie’s story but would have never happened.
Godfather is a fairly lengthy game, but the central story missions run fairly short, with slightly over 20 missions. You can get through those in less than 7 hours, but the side missions, however, were much more engaging than I expected- taking over neighborhoods and taking more direct action to affect the other Mafia families is truly rewarding. If you want, you can end up taking all over New York, and basically collecting every property in the game Pokemon style- gotta catch em all!
There are some negatives however:
- You’re primarily a one man show, which I thought disappointing, especially when you’ve feel like you earned some respect but still need to infiltrate a family compound and taken on 30 guys all by yourself.
- Clumsy weapon selection system- I wish more games would pause when you’re selecting weapons. If you suddenly have 2-3 people coming after you when you don’t have a gun ready, you’re probably going to die. On the PC, you could probably press a number to unveil a weapon instantly; in Godfather you have to scroll through them with the directional pad.
- There’s essentially one song in the whole game. Guess what that is…..
- This is a game with a story, but there’s no character development. You have a role in the story, but you’re not really part of the story if that makes any sense.
- All the fun is mainly on foot. Cars can be used to run over people and get you to different places, but there’s not much else otherwise that you can do.
Despite those issues, for those who enjoy the movie, Godfather is well worth picking up, and a good game that is improved by its connection to the movie universe and strong production values.
Tags: godfather, xbox
