The Godfather was developed by EA Redshores. EA Redshores is now currently known as Visceral games and were known for games like 007: Agent Under Fire, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and 007: Everything or Nothing.
The game was published by EA who is now well known for their work with the Battlefield series, the Mirror’s Edge series and Dead Space series.
Now before I delve into the game and the story, this game is based on the 1972 film The Godfather which is well beyond my ten year rule of spoiling things. Also, the game originally released in 2007 which also means it passed my ten year limit.
I may or may not spoil the ending of the movie, but I may or may not spoil certain scenes or plot elements of either or both. If you haven’t seen the movie or feel like this game may be of interest to you, this is your spoiler warning.
Also, if you haven’t seen the movie, it’s a classic for a reason. Even if you don’t like it, it’s almost like a required viewing for life. Get on with it. What else are you doing that’s so important you can’t sit down and watch a 3 hour epic?
The Godfather begins with a man named Johnny coming home to his beautiful wife. As he kisses her, he asks her about Aldo. She tells him his son is out in the back playing.
Suddenly, a bomb goes off, nearly killing the couple. Worried about his son, Johnny runs to the alleyway to find him. As soon as he turns around, two men in green led by a man with a cigar are staring him down.
In no time, they go from staring him down to shooting him down. As soon as the job is done, they leave the scene.
Young Aldo sees his father’s body and even before he can react, Don Vito Corleone grabs him and holds him close. He tells him that he will get his revenge.
At Connie’s Wedding, which is the first scene in the movie, Don Corleone is with Johnny’s wife who asks him to please take young Aldo under his wing.
And thus begins Aldo’s career with the Corleone family.
STORY
The story is full of questions and it’s hard to say that the story is shit because it’s based on the movie…but the story is shit.
The plot in the movie is pretty tight and concise. The plot in the game is based on the movie and it takes a few creative liberties. Unfortunately, it doesn’t pay off because the plot in the game is pretty terrible.
The game puts you in the memorable scenes of The Godfather which is cool if you’re a fan of the movie but otherwise, the rest is awful.
At the beginning, your mother says you’ve fallen with the bad crowd. We never hear anything else about that and it’s hard to believe considering your character is a “yes sir” “No sir” kind of follower.
Sooner or later, you have a romance with a character created specifically for the game and that romance is sped up and then immediately stopped in about four missions. Is it the Tesla that can go like 100mph in like 10 seconds or something? Imagine going 100mph in like ten seconds into a brick wall. That’s what the romance is like.
It goes from “You want to go onto a date” to “I don’t deserve you!” to “I couldn't save you.”
It’s almost comedic when she dies because everyone cares so much and you’re just left asking, “Who cares?”
In the movie, the timing is shown pretty well. Christmas, New Years, Spring. In the game, it’s all fast forwarded without telling you the timing. So it goes from Don Corleone being in the hospital then being fine in a matter of days and then he’s up and doing a ceremony for you at some club.
The romance is the same. If I was told that there was actually time passing between missions, I would be able to see why the romance has been built up but because it doesn’t actually say, it looks like the romance started, lasted, and ended in 2 hours.
After the first few training missions, you’re allowed into the open world without any hinderances. Being the perfectionist I am with open world games, I dominated the entire map. I took every business, destroyed every compound and wiped every family off the map.
There are story missions where the game assumes you haven’t done that much work so there’s one mission where you have to blow up a bar owned by another family. In my case, since I actually already took it, Clemenza is like, “The Tattaglias will never see this coming!” but because I already took it, I essentially bombed my own bar.
There are also story missions where you have to save people and again, since I already owned those compounds, it was weird having to kill enemies and save someone at a place that should already be crawling with your own people.
If I had to sum it up, the game is mostly a The Godfather simulator. Did you like the movie? Well, now be a part of it all!
That being said, for a video game adaptation of a movie, the game isn’t all that bad since it is technically following the movie more or less, and you do get to play the big scenes like driving Michael from the diner and helping out during the baptism but everything and everyone is so underdeveloped that even for someone who saw the movie I felt like I was being fast forwarded.
They pull quotes from the movie and insert them into the game and the cutscenes and they’re done pretty well but like your character, there’s nothing to back it up. The game doesn’t make sense unless you’ve seen the movie and sometimes that isn’t possible for everyone.
Like when they tell Sonny Corleone, the oldest son of the Corleone family, “Hey don’t lose that famous temper of yours.”
In the movie, it makes sense because they show him going insane beating the shit out of brother in law. In the game, they don’t show his temper so it’s just a cool movie line being jammed into the game.
In the movie, Don Corleone has this mystique around him that makes him someone you just want to impress. In the game, all that is gone and it’s just some old coot that your character is fond of.
AUDIO
The audio part of the game is still pretty good in May 2017. The sound effects are great especially when it comes to the weapons. The rattling of a machine gun, the echo of a pistol in an alleyway, the landing of a punches all sound great.
If I do have an issue with any part of the audio is The Godfather theme. That theme is beautiful but in the game, it’s overused. The game doesn’t really have a soundtrack besides using the theme. Sometimes they’ll alter it by speeding it up, slowing it down, or adding some dumb little stinger at the end of it but in the end it’s still just the same theme.
The problem with over using the theme is that well, the theme is beautifully composed but the game soundtrack sounds awful. Any song that plays that isn’t the theme sounds cheesy and generic.
There’s also no radio. Whenever you get into the car, the theme just automatically plays and without a proper fast travel system in the beginning of the game, well, like I said, it’ll get tiring.
There are a few bugs here and there where the audio cuts out so some characters talking to you will have subtitles but no audio or an explosion is heard seconds after the actual explosion or even just sound cutting off entirely and you only hear your gunshots.
But those happen once in a blue moon. I wouldn’t say they’re a constant worry.
The voice acting is great too, so long as it’s from the main characters. They sound like they did in the movie. Wikipedia’s intro for the game briefly states that most of the actors that played the original characters came back to record lines for the game and whether or not that’s true, it sounds authentic.
That being said, as I mentioned before, the lines are just jammed into the game so even if the delivery sounds great, it doesn’t make sense as to why it’s being said in the game’s context. In the movie, Tom Hagen briefs Don Corleone on who the Turk is and what his game with drugs is. In the game, the same exact lines are used but rather he tells you as you’re driving him home and at the time, your character isn’t even an associate in the family. So him telling you and the capo all this information makes Tom Hagen look like a guy with loose lips.
Your character’s voice acting is pretty awful at times too. When he’s intimidating someone, it sounds believable but there are times when he just says ass kissing things like “What can I do for the family?” that makes me imagine him saying, “How else can I kiss your ass for the family? Can I suck your ass for the family?” In the same tone. It never sounds natural and it’s never 100% believable.
VISUALS
When it comes to visuals, I do have to be careful in reviewing it because this game is a remastered version of the PS2 game. We’re in the Playstation 4, Xbox One era. We’ve come a long way so to judge it based on anything remotely modern would be incredibly unfair.
For one the main characters from the film that appear in the game are actually incredibly detailed. They look damn good considering I never questioned who was who. That’s Sonny. That’s Pete. That’s Don Vito Corlone. That’s Tom Hagen. Unfortunately, this becomes a Yakuza dilemma in that while the main characters are detailed, everyone else looks generic and the same models are reused for people you encounter that aren’t main characters.
The exception is Michael Corleone. He looks like a random nobody which was done for legal reasons but it’s hard to believe they didn’t do a little extra work with Michael considering his huge role not only in the movie but in the trilogy.
Your character, if you don’t customize him enough also looks like a generic NPC.
And like in Yakuza, these character models are used without discrimination. You’ll encounter the same faces and models throughout the first hour of gameplay.
Along with the main characters, the environment can be described in a similar manner. The little businesses you extort will reuse the same assets so once you’ve been in two flower shops, you’ve been in all the flower shops. You’ve been in two hotels, you’ve been in all the hotels. You’ve been in one warehouse, you’ve been in all the warehouses.
Where the environments begin to differ is usually the borough or the main family compounds. When you go to Brooklyn, it looks like Little Italy, little town, little businesses, but then you go to New Jersey and it’s a lot more suburban with nicer homes and nicer vehicles and then you go to Hell’s Kitchen that’s a little more seedy and the vehicles are a lot uglier and some of them are already damaged. While you encounter people in suits and dresses in Brooklyn, in Hell’s Kitchen you see a lot more of the working class.
The compounds are similar. The Tattaglia compound looks close to what the Corleone compound looks like but they have a bigger garden. then the Stracci’s in New Jersey have a nicer cleaner whiter home, then the Cuneo’s in Hell’s Kitchen compound isn’t even in livable conditions yet. The Barzini compound in Midtown however takes the cake in how big it is and how well defended it is but you can tell they just copied and pasted several assets from the Hollywood mansion mission.
So yeah, with the environment, you’ll see a lot of cut and paste like you do with characters but for a PS2 open world game, this shouldn’t come as a surprise considering how much you can go into and do in this world.
The idle animations of characters are also cut and paste.
GAMEPLAY
The gameplay revolves around you representing the Corleone family and taking back the city. The story missions are lame and with little variety. If the story missions are being forced down your throat, then the actual mission almost feels forced.
If you really look at the missions critically it almost undermines what the movie accomplished. For example, Don Corleone gets shot and sent to the hospital where he’s then under watch by Corleone guards. When Michael decides to visit and nobody’s around, he ends up moving the Don, goes outside with a random visitor and both of them put their hands into their coats. When the enemy family drives by to see if it’s clear, it’s a suspenseful scene.
In the game, you just clear out a wave of enemies that got into the hospital.
In the movie, consigliere Tom goes out to Hollywood to speak to the producer that refuses to give Johnny Fontane, the Don’s nephew a part in his movie. When the producer refuses, he wakes up to his prized horse’s head in his bed. So in the movie, you’re left wondering how did the Don get that there?
In the game, this becomes a lame stealth mission and takes away the cool mystery away from the scene.
In essence, the video game turns these cool story moments into dumb missions because video game.
The true spirit of the game is when you extort businesses and take over New York. There’s a little feeling of excitement and accomplishment when the icons of your enemies become icons of the Corleone family.
If you’ve played Mafia 3, this game is basically like that. A pretty massive world and you take over the world little by little and each business you take, the more money you rake in for you and your family and the higher your rank. As you rank up, you can upgrade your skills such as health or your expertise with weapons.
As I mentioned before, the inner perfectionist in my came out and I took over the entire city before like the 5th mission. I did it as an outsider more or less.
As you do story missions, your rank increases and you become more important in the family. As an outsider and associate, you have to give away 70% of what you earn and you can’t really do anything. As a soldier, your tribute is now 60% and you can hire another person of your rank to come and help you.
If you play the game as you’re supposed to and only taking over the businesses slowly while doing the story missions, this can help you tremendously. If you do what I did and eliminate everyone else as soon as I was released, these little perks don’t do anything to help.
Wow more money to afford a new gun upgrade? Wait, I destroyed all four compounds with this basic load out. Who cares? Wow I can hire people to fight alongside me? Wait, i took over every business without help. Who cares?
And the skills you obtain by leveling up really help. Your negotiation skills if upgraded enough and in time, means you essentially take over businesses without trouble. At the beginning of the game, you’re instructed to threaten a shop keeper until they pay out. When your skills are high enough in that area, you can just talk to a shop keeper and they’ll pay out immediately without you having to raise a finger.
Racket leaders are a little different. When you have the money, you don’t have to extort them, you can just buy them out and that not only saves you on time, health and ammo, you get the maximum weekly pay.
While you're running around New York, you’ll undoubtedly catch the attention of the police and of the other families.
When you run into a police captain or police officer, you can bribe them and for a limited time, they’ll not only look the other way for small crimes but even help you fight your enemies given they’re in the area.
As you take over businesses and kill your enemies, your vendetta with the other families goes up. If your vendetta with a certain family reaches a certain point, you start a mob war. The only way to win a mob war is by bombing one of their businesses or paying off an FBI agent. Neither of these makes any sense because if you bomb a business, you have to wait until it’s fixed up so you can take over. Paying off an FBI agent feels no different from paying off a cop and in the mafia pop culture, I always considered the FBI to be incorruptible.
However, if you don’t do either of these, the family with that high vendetta, will relentessly pursue you and hunt you down while also destroying your own businesses which means a loss in revenue for you
When it comes down to the controls, they’re actually really easy to get used to. This version of the game takes advantage of the SixAxxis capability of the controller and to my surprise this is the best it’s ever been used. However, you can just easily ignore it so it’s not really a big deal. Anyways, the controls are easy to get used to and that’s saying something considering I had trouble playing Batman Arkham Asylum after playing Batman Arkham Knight.
All that being said though, like Mafia 3, the game is pretty repetitive so unless you’re a big fan of The Godfather, this game is going to get boring real quick.
CONCLUSION
At the end of it all, the game isn’t terrible. It’s a pretty great video game adaptation of the film. While the film scenes are forced down your throat in the game, it otherwise does a pretty decent job at putting you inside the world of The Godfather.
In the movie, the other families tend to take a backseat of the overall narrative. You only hear the names of the other families once in a meeting with all the heads of the families. Otherwise, in the film, it’s the Corleone’s, the Tattaglia’s, and the Barzini’s. So for this game to explore that part of the game a little more is interesting.
Not only that, but it allows you to take on the role of someone in the mafia underworld and take over businesses and engage in firefights against the other families.
However, I can’t say that the story of the game is great because the original story from the movie is better and what they did to make it into a video game storyline made the original story a little less interesting.
The characters are the same. They were done brilliantly in the movie. What we get in the game is basically the mini versions of these characters. Tom Hagen isn’t shown to be this cool headed antithesis to Sonny’s temper. They’re all just mission givers.
And this all really sucks because the game version is the perfect place to expand on everything because there’s really no limit. The movie was 2 hours and 58 minutes. The original game’s story according to how long to beat dot com, is 14 hours. That is 11 hours more than the movie where you could have at least shown some decent buildup to the story missions or written some better characterization for literally anyone.
The story is meh, the characters are poorly written, the audio is good, the visuals are decent, and the gameplay is repetitive.
I originally got this game and beat it back in middle school…or high school? And I bought it again in May 2017 for a ridiculous price of 25 dollars. The Don’s Edition seems to be the best version in that it has a lot more included than the other ones and it’s all on the disc so you don’t need to buy a brand new disc (if that even exists anymore).
What’s weird is that I loved this game back then. I don’t know if it was that I was just playing a Rated M game as a kid or that I saw The Godfather as a kid but that feeling is totally gone now. I just recently saw the movie in May 2017 for a film class I had and immediately after, relying on that feeling I had as a kid, I went to go buy it the next chance I got. Just like The Order: 1886, I guess my past feelings don’t agree with my current feelings.
My recommendation is to play it if this sort of thing interests you. If you liked The Godfather and liked the mere idea of being part of the Corleone family, this you’ll like this game.
If you want a better story and a more modern take on this formula, Mafia 3 may be a better bet.
And as I’m about to say what I gave this game, please remember that this review doesn’t affect how I feel about the movie. Again, if you haven’t seen the movie, you need to. It’s just one of those movies you need to see before you die.
So from me, The Godfather: The Don’s Edition gets a 5…out of 10.