A waste of a good licence
I quite enjoyed the first game, yes it got repetitive but it was enjoyable none the less. This game however is appalling, it feels like it was thrown together in a couple of months by people with no pride in what they do.
One improvement over the first should have been the henchmen, this time round you get to train them up and they feel more like a crew and less like a gang of random A.I as they did in the first game. The problem is the A.I is awful, they have more comedy value than anything else. They'll run around in circles when trying to get into a car, they'll do the same right in front of you in the middle of a gun battle too. They rarely use cover preferring instead to stand there trading bullets with equality stupid enemy A.I, that's when they're not mysteriously managing to go from behind you to in front you without passing you. I don't remember a teleport system being part of the movies. How anyone at E.A thought this is acceptable is beyond me.
The gameplay starts off OK and the gunplay is decent enough with a cover system that works well but sadly it soon gets very repetitive. Go to a rivals business, kill the gang members there, bully the owner into paying you protection, repeat ad infinitum. Even when someone takes one of your businesses the formula doesn't change unless you use the automated system to recover your business. The inclusion of a mode that plays the game for you says it all. The only other activity on offer is murdering people or destroying property at the request of random pedestrians, your reward being cash or the whereabouts of one the rival gangs senior members. The problem here is the gameworld is so small you're often tasked with smashing up your own business or even worse blowing the thing up, it makes no sense at all.
Graphically it's ugly, GTA 3 looked better than this. Cars pop in a few feet in front of you, the textures are the sort of "quality" last seen on the PS2. This looks no better than the first Godfather game on the Wii. I'm running it at 1680x1050 with everything maxed out and it still looks terrible, the wildly erratic framerate doesn't help either. I can play Fallout3 at the same resolution with all the eye candy on, why on earth does something this ugly looking sometimes drop as low as 20fps before flying back up to 60 and back down again? It's an unoptimised mess.
The driving physics are poor and the car models ugly, I can't say much about the physics system in the rest of the game because there isn't one.
The Godfather movies are timeless classics, something this mess will never be.
Don't bother with this even if it's in the bargain bin, there are far better games out there. If you've not got the Movie boxset then buy that instead.
