The Godfather II game review

on April 24, 2009 at 2:30 PM, updated May 28, 2009 at 4:56 PM

Being a mob boss mostly boils down to being a homicidal bully in The Godfather II, but there are a lot of management skills involved, too. Images courtesy of EA.

Put on your Wayfarers, slick your hair and slip brass knuckles into your pocket. You have to "think like a don" in The Godfather II, EA's new open-world action game that casts you as second-in-command to Michael Corleone the iconic crime saga.

Gameplay is similar to Grand Theft Auto IV or Saints Row 2, but it takes place the late 1950s. The mobsters have a Rat Pack look to them. Your job as a fledgling mob boss is to drive the other families out of business by taking over crime rings such as drugs and prostitution. You do this mostly by being a murderous bully with management skills.



Driving in The Godfather II is a lot like Grand Theft Auto IV. I tried to be mindful of pedestrians, but nobody on the sidewalk was safe from me despite my best efforts.

Use muscle, management skills in EA's The Godfather II


Game type: Open-world action. Maker: EA.

Platforms: Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also available for PlayStation 3 and PC.

Hits: The Godfather II is true to its source material and isn't shy about being a game for grown-ups. Like the novel and movie, it depicts characters who are all kinds of evil, and you see the story through the eyes of an insider. It includes vicious violence meant to intimidate rivals. For example, it might prescribe the method you must use to carry out a "hit," such as strangling the victim, to make the greatest impression on bystanders.

Some Mature-rated games like this are absurdly coy about nudity -- as if nudity is more off-putting than brutality or murder -- but not The Godfather II. When you enter a brothel or strip joint in this game, you find topless dancers. The story isn't about those dancers, but they're a natural part of the setting. The fact that the dancers are very aesthetically rendered doesn't hurt the game, either.

I give The Godfather II top marks for customization: You can tweak your character's face, hair, physique and clothing to a greater degree than in many role-playing games. When a game is telling a story, it's fitting that the player is like a co-author, helping to create the character you control. Not only can you customize your own character, but those of your "crew" of thugs.

I had a great time doing this. I outfitted my crew like a "Star Trek" away team, with myself as Captain Kirk in a gold turtleneck, tuxedo pants and boots, my medic in a blue shirt and my arson specialist in a red engineering shirt. My game was like the inverse of the old Trek episode called "A Piece of the Action" when the away team posed as mobsters, because my mobsters were posing as Star Fleet!

Misses: I never knew that "thinking like a don" would require an advanced degree in skulduggery. It's one thing for a game to have depth of strategy, but The Godfather II is so complicated that it might intimidate you to reform and forget your life of crime completely. You must hire and assign guards for your brothels and gambling joints and other shady enterprises, respond to attacks here and there by dispatching members of your crew, balance your crew with a variety of nefarious specialities such as arson or lock-picking, and many other tedious details from Mafia Management 101. It's exhausting.

Would it help me understand "the don's view" if I spoke Sicilian? Probably not.

Despite all the arcana of the day-to-day business of running a mob crew, it all boils down to thuggery. The game would be more fun if it streamlined a lot of those details, delegating menial tasks and simplifying the bewildering city map with its hieroglyphic icons.

You might not recognize Michael Corleone in the game, by the way, because he looks and sounds nothing like Al Pacino.

Content Rating: Mature.

Recommendation: I like the evolution in gaming that The Godfather II represents. I like the open-world freedom. I like the customization to make the characters my own. I enjoy having a game that respects me enough to depict nudity when it's appropriate to the story, much like an R-rated movie would. If you enjoyed The Godfather movies and you like Grand Theft Auto IV or Saints Row 2, you'd be the target audience for The Godfather II.

However, it's hard to recommend The Godfather II, because it gets bogged down in management minutia. Maybe a life of crime ultimately doesn't pay, but if you were a don, it seems like it would be more fun.

Grade: B-

Bryan Crowson is copy desk chief for The Birmingham News and a "made" gamer. Write to him at