The Godfather II is a good game, but most people will probably get bored of its design within a few hours.
You play as a guy named Dominic, one of Micheal Corleone's most trusted men. You're basically the Don of the Corleone family, with Vito Corleone not even mentioned throughout the whole game. After a brief introduction set in Cuba, you fly back to New York to basically make a name for yourself among the other families. Nearly all your time is spent taking over rival family's businesses to make more money and eventually making the families retreat into their compounds where you'll be able to permanently eliminate them. The thing is, where's the actual story? Well, there isn't really one. You meet some old millionaire guy called Hyman Roth who acts as your friend to help you take out the families. There are a few actual missions--no more than five in the game--but these aren't all that fun to do.
The gameplay in The Godfather II feels like an uninspired version of Grand Theft Auto IV. There aren't a ton of weapons in the game, and the only ones you'll probably use is the thompson submachine gun and the shotgun, nothing else. The shotgun will pretty much automatically kill an enemy if you fire close enough to them, but the enemy AI is pathetically stupid. Most of them simply stand out in the open or attempt to charge at you instead of doing something smart like duck behind a wall for cover. Thankfully the guys you recruit into your own family or at least somewhat smart. Occasionally they'll have difficulty entering your car or through a door, but they get the job done, albeit not in the prettiest fashion.
You can get up to three guys to follow you around, and each has his own special ability. One is a demolitions expert, meaning he can blow a hole through walls to create shortcuts; another is an engineer who can cut through fences; and then there's the medic, who's arguably the most useful of them all. If you or any one of your teammates gets downed, he simply walks up to you and sticks a needle in you and you'll be ready to go. You can recruit up to seven of these guys in total to your family, and you can swap them or others at any given time, so if you need to blow a hole in a wall but you don't have a demolition expert, you can swap one of the guys currently following you for him. You can spend money to upgrade your health and theirs and so on, and even promote your men to make them specialize in more than one thing. It's wise to bring all three men with you at all times, because the building design is really unpredictable. For example, if you're infiltrating an enemy compound which is usually a big mansion, there may be a few different doors visible, but the only way in might be to blow up part of the wall or cut a hole in a fence. Unfortunately, more things are unpredictable. Your guy can cut through a fence, but when you try it on another, identical-looking fence, nothing will happen. Same thing with doors. You can't even tell if you'll be able to vault over a small walls unless you try to.
You don't just earn money from taking over businesses. You also unlock special perks such as more melee damage, bulletproof vests or armored cars. These may seem like they would add some degree of strategy to the game when really they don't significantly impact the game's difficulty. Rival families will often try to reclaim your businesses, so it's wise to hire guards for that particular business. They may not be too great in combat, but at the very least they'll buy you some time to send one of your own men their or for you to try and get over there and stop them. Like I said before, there are some actual missions, but not too many, and they aren't that fun. One involves sneaking around a building full of guards without being seen. Where's the fun in that? And why not just kill all of them? Once you've taken control of all a family's businesses, they'll retreat to their compound, which is a huge mansion. All you have to do is find a place inside the mansion to place a bomb, get out of the building before it explodes, and you'll kill all the family's top men without actually encountering them. Once you take down these five families, there isn't that much to do besides doing favors for random people. Multiplayer supports up to 16 players in modes like Team Deathmatch, Demolition Assault, Safecracker and Firestarter. Unfortunately, completing objectives in a non-deathmatch mode doesn't earn you nearly as many points as simply killing people.
The visuals are pretty bad. There's a lot of clipping and a lot of the world just isn't that detailed. Not to mention how small each city is, and New York looks more like Charlotte, though you can see the outline of Manhattan in the background. There are a few cutscenes that actually look halfway decent, but these are quite rare. The audio department doesn't fare much better. You'll hear the classic Godfather theme, but most of the voice acting is atrociously bad, especially Hyman Roth. Oh, I forgot to mention that there are strip clubs that include women topless, and you can see their behinds through their panties. I would recommend waiting a few months and renting this game, since you'll probably beat it in under 10 hours. I'm not going to lie, I did have some fun playing this game, but then again, I did only say "some." Skip this title if you're not into getting easy achievements or aren't a Godfather fan. Hopefully the next one will be better.