The Godfather 2 was developed by EA Redwood Shores and published by Electronic Arts.
The Godfather 2 is a third person action shooter game with RPG elements.
The game was released in 2009 and hasn’t met my statute of limitations however, the movie has and the game is based on the movie so if you have yet to see the sequel or are worried about being spoiled, this is your warning.
The Godfather 2 begins with a bang, literally. New Year's Eve Fireworks being shot into the air, disrupting the calm of the night.
Unrelated to the fireworks, a cake is brought out to Hyman Roth, a great friend to the Corleone family. Surrounded by him are dons of different families including Michael Corleone. Hyman Roth isn't your typical gangster. He doesn't have a family of his own but rather, is a man of tranquility that makes money for everyone involved.
After everyone has cake, you and the rest of the party head downstairs to join the New Year's festivities. Almost immediately, over the loudspeakers, the president of Cuba announces his resignation and his retreat from the capital.
With the victory of the rebels, the entire country breaks into chaos. Knowing Michael Corleone has been a big financial supporter of the president, the rebels target him and it's up to his brother Fredo, his right hand man Aldo and you to safely take him to the airport.
After a tragic turn of events, Michael promotes you to Don, in order to take care of Corleone business in New York.
You're in charge now, Dominic.
STORY
Much like how the first game followed alongside the events of the first movie, the second game follows alongside the events of the second movie.
Much of the criticisms I had about the first game is still a concern here. Unless you've seen the movie, which somehow has more development than a 12 hour long game, the plot in this game moves ridiculously fast.
The beginning of the game where it goes from Hyman Roth's introduction to a party to the Rebels winning to there being a big mob feud all happen in less than an hour. I understand that they needed a reason to get you into the game while also fit you into The Godfather storyline, but they could have done it with a lot more finesse and development.
In theory, a sequel should build on what the first one did whether it's to make the great even better or just avoid making the same mistakes. The storyline of The Godfather 2 just repeated the same mistakes. If not made a bigger mistake in telling the story. In the first Godfather, your character Aldo was involved in the big events that happened in the movie but only in the background more often than not. In The Godfather 2, not only is the series of events changed for the game, but your character is more directly involved in all of the movie’s big events. Whereas you helped get the horse’s head into Jack Woltz’s bed in the first game which worked because they don’t actually showed what happened in the movie, in the second game somehow you’re put in a position to kill Fidel Castro? I mean, what? And there’s this scene in the movie, and this is a spoiler but Hyman Roth is killed by a hitman in the airport and the hitman is then killed right after. For one reason or another, it’s a powerful scene because someone sacrificed themselves to get Hyman Roth. In the game, that scene is trivialized by making you the assassin and then rather than become this “Holy shit” plot moment, it’s cheated by afterwards going, “Escape the cops.”
So in The Godfather 2, you play as Dominic, a man who works for Aldo. Aldo is actually the character you play as in the first game even though he's never referred to by name in the 1st game.
That was actually pretty cool in a very trivial way. Trivial because in this game Aldo could have been replaced by literally anyone else and in the first game, a cardboard box had more personality than him. But if you played the 1st one, you knew his journey and I guess it's cool they doubled down by having him here.
Dominic has more of a personality than Aldo ever had in the first game but by no means, is he memorable.
Another complaint I have about the writing, is the dialogue. Once again, they jam lines from the movie into the game. However, there is a small improvement in that they lessened the number of lines and the ones they did jam in there more or less made sense in their context.
AUDIO
The voice acting is pretty bad from the main characters. Unlike the first one, only Robert DuVall came back to voice his original character, Corleone family lawyer and consigliere Tom Hagen. Everyone else had a voice actor hired to imitate the original voice.
Hyman Roth has the worst voice actor of the bunch. It sounds like an awful impression of Christopher Walken at worst and at best like a young guy doing an old guy impression.
Fredo Corleone has the calmest voice ever and it doesn't sound well when it’s a moment of high tension. In the movie, he does have a calm demeanor but the actor is obviously good at what he does because in the movie, he is the older brother that’s over looked because he tends to be a simpleton. So he’s always just accepting it. However, in the game, because there’s no development and the voice acting is off for him, he sounds like he’s been defeated.
Your character’s delivery isn’t as ass kissing as the main character from the first one but it never really rises or lowers in tone. His tone remains the same and for those few moments where there IS emotion? His body doesn’t support it
And the main character of the movie: Michael Corleone is almost always deadpan as well. I know the character of Michael Corleone is pretty badass but Al Pacino brought him to life! I know it’s wrong to say this in our constantly evolving media but Al Pacino made damn sure there will never be a better iteration of Michael Corleone. When the bar is set so high and then you follow the act with sub par acting, it looks worse than it is.
There does happen to be an actual radio when you get in the car so it’s not the constant Godfather theme every time you get into the car like in the first one. The problem is that the radio works when it wants to. For some reason, some cars just don’t play any music.
The score of the game is a little more varied but just like in the first one, when you have the beautifully composed Love theme from the Godfather…you can tell what was made for the video game soundtrack because it all sounds awful.
VISUALS
The visuals are a tiny improvement from the first one. The main characters from the movie besides Michael Corleone once again look exactly the way they do in the movie. There’s never a doubt of who’s who. I mean, even the main character from the first game when he appears in this game, looks older but still somewhat the same, given that you didn’t make him a horrible monster in the first one with the customization.
Also, Michael looks different from the first game. They didn’t even keep his not-Al-Pacino look consistent. Now he just looks like an ugly Dustin Hoffman.
The environments are detailed enough for you to tell them apart but not enough to make you feel any thing else. “Wow, this is Florida and this is New York…alright then.” And that’ll be as far as your thoughts go when you see the environments. They’re not great. More or less the businesses you take over look the same from one another. You been to two warehouses, you’ve been to all of them.
I read some reviews of this game and apparently, the loading in of the world around you is considered pretty bad and that’s saying something. I don’t really consider that too much of a criticism because most open world games during the PS3 era had that. You know where, you drive so fast, everyone can be seen loading in and out of reality. However for it to be a constant complaint in reviews, I suppose it was worse than the norm.
What really differs from one another is the compounds of the main families. Each one is differently constructed so each one is it’s own little adventure. It’s not a crazy adventure because in all of them you have to go around the front and essentially just look for the back door but at the very least they’re all visually different from one another.
The animations are weird. They reused some of the extorting animations over again and just in general, the way your character walks is just weird. Who walks like that?
Technically speaking, the loading times were fine, the frame rate would drop here and there but not significantly. The screen tearing was pretty bad but it never got in the way of me playing.
GAMEPLAY
Alright, gameplay is probably the most positive I’ll be about this game and that is not saying much.
For one, the driving somehow worsened in this game. The driving is stiff and difficult to control plus, if you happen to swerve around cars enough times in a short distance, you’ll just completely lose control of your car. Also, the first one made it easy to traverse the open world with a car on every street. In this game, there will be moments that if you lose your car, you have no choice but to run to your next objective. I’m pretty sure New York had more cars than this game represents back in the 60s.
The gunplay is pretty much the same. You lock on, you shoot, you kill.
Taking over rackets and businesses is also essentially the same from the first game. You wipe out all enemy guards and then you extort the businesses owner.
You can do this alone or you can go in with your crew. Yes, in this game, you are finally given the crew a man of your rank deserves.
This is where the RPG element of the game comes into play. In creating your family, you have four slots for soldiers. From those four, you can promote a soldier to a capo regime and you can have two capos max. From those two, you can promote one to be your underboss.
Each person you hire has a specific talent or ability. The medic ability can revive your crew mates or you on the battlefield. The lock pick can open locked doors and safes. All of the abilities are self explanatory: arson, demolition, engineer, etc. When you hire someone, they first come into your family as a soldier.
If you promote them to Capo, they can learn another ability. If you promote them to Underboss, they can learn yet another abilitiy. So by the end, you can have one of your men who will possess the abilities of three soldiers. This is useful because for some dumb reason, you can only have three crew members along with you out of the seven you have altogether.
In the first one, you could only upgrade yourself with skill points. The sequel did away with all of that and money rules the upgrading game. It really feels cheap and tacky. The skill points took forever in the first game and it really wasn’t that inventive but at least it didn’t feel as lazy.
What’s worse is that your character’s upgrades are the same as your men’s upgrades, which doesn’t make you feel special at all and normally your character should at the very least feel better than the rest.
Now, in the first game, when you took over a business, that was the end of it. Once you had it, it was yours forever. In the second one, unless you’ve destroyed the compound, there is a chance an enemy family will take it back. If you have men you’re willing to part with, you can send them to defend it otherwise you have to go yourself. To help in these defenses, you can hire a certain number of guards for each business. If three men are attacking a place with only two bodyguards, you might have to part with your entire family but if three men are attacking a place with twenty men, you might not have to send anyone to defend.
Each business is also a part of a crime ring. For every crime ring you dominate, you get a special ability to help you in your fight. If you get the prostitution ring, guards cost go does dramatically. If you get the chop shop ring, you get access to armored cars. These crime rings can also give you incendiary bullets and bulletproof vests.
While the armored cars and incendiary bullets are cool, the vests that reduce damage and the bullet belts that allow you carry ammo are on you for as long as you own the crime rings and it just looks ugly on your character because your character and his clothing is customizable. However, when there’s a big black vest and a bullet belt essentially covering up your torso, what good is the customizable clothing?
The game tells you that strategy is important and that you should think one step ahead of the enemy but that’s really not necessary mostly because this game is extremely easy.
The game offers examples like, “If you want to weaken a family, kill a capo, bomb a business, take over a crime ring and that will make it easier to defeat your enemy.” None of that is necessary.
You can essentially be a hitman and kill members of an opposing family which supposedly makes the game easier because these members lead the attacks on your businesses and will be at the family compound when you go to attack. So killing them lessens the attacks and makes taking a compound easier. The problem is that if you destroy the compound, they are all automatically killed anyways and to kill them one by one is more trouble than it’s worth. To kill a member of another family, you have to do a favor for a person, do the favor, and then you have to kill that person in a specific way because it has to send a message. Otherwise, they just go to the hospital and try again. It just isn’t worth it.
The game is too easy to have to go through all that. Destroy the compound and you kill them all in one easy explosion and the only difference between them and regular enemies is that they have more health. That’s ot.
Another strategy is to bomb a business but that’s pointless because it’s easier to take a business than it is to bomb it. Bombing it disrupts their business but that literally doesn't matter. If you bomb it, it’s closed for a day and you can’t take it.
Taking over a crime ring to give you an edge helps but I never specifically took over businesses to take over a crime ring. I always just got those businesses by accident. I just went to the closest business regardless of who owned it and took over.
The game with all the little details in your men, who you promote, how you defend your businesses…it all just boils down to rinse and repeat. Go to business, shoot enemies, take over.
The game has a lock on ability that throws the word challenging right out the window. The first game forced me to constantly find cover whenever I could but in this one, I only took cover once every three hours. With the lock on ability and the constant regenerating health and the medic bringing me back, there was literally no point in trying to be careful.
The game isn’t just easy but it’s pretty buggy too. Sometimes, the people you’re supposed to extort never appear because they might have fallen through the world. Other times, like for me, a business was being attacked so I went personally as it was just around the corner. To ensure I was given some time, I sent a soldier to help defend while I was heading over there. When I arrived, the soldier I sent was running around in circles around the building and I went inside the building and there were no enemies. However, the game still assumed that the establishment was being attacked. So I was just standing there, waiting for the nonexistent attack to end.
Another bug that happened was when I ended up taking over the entire map. Like in the first one, I stopped doing story missions and just jumped into the open world and took over all the businesses. When I did, I went back to story missions and after a mission or two, I got another mission which was to expand my empire. The problem was that I already did it and I guess the game didn’t detect that so I was left to just free roam in an open world with nothing to do.
Luckily, both of these times, a simple restart fixed it. When I came back to the place being under attack, the enemies were actually present. When I came back to the game where my objective was to expand my empire, it immediately changed to the next mission.
Unlike the last game where you could only save at a safe house, in The Godfather 2 you could save anywhere and the autosave feature never gave me a problem. I never loaded in a weird place or in an awkward situation.
I also don’t know where to put this but the subtitles in this game were off multiple times. I assume this game was made by Americans because for one, consigliere is misspelled in the subtitles often if not every time. One time, bienvenido is misspelled as well. These are tiny mistakes but if you’re going to have a game featuring italian american mafiosos going to a spansih speaking country, for the love of christ, spell the few words not in english, correctly.
It just really irritated me because it shows that the game was just unpolished in general. If it was like Resident Evil 4 where the game plays magnificently and then you see “brigde” instead of “bridge” I’d let it slide because it happens.
CONCLUSION
I really don’t know how to word my final thoughts on The Godfather 2. The original wasn’t all that great to begin with and the second one seems to have made it worse somehow but still keeping some of the good things and leaving them unchanged.
The story followed the movie, cool but put you in the spotlight rather than you working in the shadows, uncool. The movie has some pretty kickass lines that really characterized people, cool but the game just jams these cool lines hoping to have the same effect, uncool.
The gameplay is generally the same from the first one to take over businesses, cool but now it’s so easy that it’s just a chore, uncool.
The second stopped using the theme so much, cool but the score is still cheap compared to it, uncool. Your character sounds less of a kiss ass in this one, cool but everyone else sounds awful, uncool.
Nevermind, I’ve got it. The game represents one step forward, two steps back.
I originally felt like giving up while I was playing this just because it was really hard to care about literally anything in the game. I beat this game back when it first came out like the first Godfather but then over time, i sold it and until recently after rewatching the Godfather, I bought it again along with the first game.
I can’t remember what I felt playing this as a kid and to be fair, I don’t know how I feel now. I probably won’t be playing it again for a third time but I can’t say it’s the worst game of all time.
I don’t know how or what a third game would have been based off, but if this was how they treated a sequel to a somewhat decent game, I’m afraid to think of how much a piece of shit the third one would have been and that’s saying something. If they somehow found a way to make two amazing storylines into mediocrity, imagine what they would have done to the weakest storyline out of the three movies?
If you loved the second movie, don’t bother ruining it for yourself by playing this game. If you liked the first Godfather game, stick with that one because this is essentially a downgrade because at least in the first one you can just say, “Well, it was a simple game.” You can’t say the same about this one.
I bought this game used for 20 bucks which is far more than what it’s worth and I don’t understand how this game and the original Godfather game are so damn expensive because they don’t age well.
Anyways, from me The Godfather 2 gets a 3…out of 10.