/ 10 April 2009

Godfather II – fives hours in…

Three years ago, EA took the first Godfather movie and turned it into a reasonably entertaining first-person shooter. Since then, the publisher’s Redwood Shores development team has brought the whole concept back to the drawing board and attempted to produce something a lot more tactical.

The idea is to give you an overview of how organised crime worked in the sixties. So in Godfather II, you take on the role of Dominic, the rising Corleone don of New York.

In this role, it’s up to you to ensure that the Corleones own every racket in town, from guns and drugs to prostitution and diamond smuggling. I’ve been playing for several hours now and wanted to report back on what I’ve seen so far…

And what I’ve enjoyed from the beginning is the sort of collect-’em-all compulsion of the game’s strategic exo-skeleton. To take over a racket, you just turn up at the place that’s fronting it, probably a bar or warehouse, shoot all the guards and intimidate the owner til he or she comes over to your side. Then you can check out your Don’s View map which shows all the rackets in the city, and see that this one is now yours.

It’s an interesting idea. Not only are you running around the streets with your Tommy Gun, shotgun or pistol, blasting enemy thugs (there are seven weapon types, each boasting three possible upgrades), you’re also managing your income generators from above, making sure they’re not being attacked by rival families, choosing the next targets for your empire. Once you own a racket, you’ve got to leave some of your chaps in there to guard it, which costs money — so the financial element must be monitored too. Plus, you’re able to recruit a private army — or family — of seven differently skilled men, each of which can be upgraded with new specialties and better weapons licenses.

The Godfather then, is a multilayered adventure, part shooter, part Risk-style strategy title (your ultimate aim is to take over all the crimes in the three cities — New York, Havana and Miami) and part RPG, complete with character progression and team battles. Right from the start, you’re in the thick of the movie’s intrigue, with characters like Michael Corleone, Hyman Roth and Frankie Pentangeli all maneuvering for power and favour between the five crime families. As executive producer Hunter Smith explains, “Both of the first Godfather movies began with big celebrations at the Corleone house with lots of people coming in talking to the don, asking for favours, because he had important people in his pocket. It’s an important part of being the don. The same thing happens inside the game.”

As a Corleone underling, flung into power by the death of your boss, you’re trying to eke out your position in the milieu, to find out who to trust. It all plays out through passable cut-scenes, filled with decent dialogue, but rather lacking in truly detailed character modeling or convincing animation. The important thing is, however, you get the feeling that you’re in the middle of a huge war.

Micro-management of your mini-army is thankfully pretty simple. You can only have three of your seven made men with you on the streets at any time, and they can be ordered to go somewhere, simply by pointing in the right direction and hitting a button. There are certain areas where one of their specialties might come in handy — maybe a lock that needs picking, or a door that needs blasting — and these are indicated by a flashing icon near the offending object. It would be nice to be able to use your own intuition at times, and experiment with where to, say, plant your explosives but the idea is to keep the mechanics of the game as simple as possible.

Shoot-outs are excellent fun. The context-sensitive cover system sticks you behind nearby walls if you click the right analogue stick; there’s also a reliable lock-on feature on the left trigger, so you can shoot at enemies and circle them at the same time.

Melee combat is a synch too with left and right punch on the corresponding triggers; press both and you can grab an enemy and toss them about the place, which looks suitably deranged and violent, especially when you select to click the right stick for a gut-wrenching finishing move.

The intimidation scenes are psychotic but horribly amusing. When you want to take over a drugs, gun or diamond racket, you need to find the boss, then effectively torture them into giving the place up to you. There’s a little gauge with two red lines — bully them past the first and they’ll be ready to give up, but you can keep punching, head-butting or shaking them to up the amount of money they provide to you. Push them to the second red line, though, and they’ll either fight back with extreme prejudice or drop dead. It’s sort of like a draw and fade gauge on a golf sim — but with baseball bats and body parts.

The interesting thing about the violence in Godfather II, is that it is both hugely visceral and ever so slightly cerebral. It requires research. Racket bosses each have a specific fear or weakness — some hate to be hit in the face, some crumble if you start smashing their store up — find the right one and it makes the intimidation process a lot quicker and more profitable. Also, it’s possible to assassinate the made men employed by rival families, but to do this, you need to find out exactly the right way to kill them. It might be strangulation, it might be shoving them off the top of a building. If you don’t get it right, they just go to hospital, then hit the streets again in a few days.

So it’s all about balancing and responding to information. At any one time there’s a rival family attacking your chop shops or money laundering outfits, while Michael Corleone has a story mission for you and you have a few side-quests on the go.

Often passers-by will have money or information icons over their heads — go up and talk to them and they’ll give you little jobs to do, which can help you find your enemies’ weak spots, or just fill your family coffers. This is a quite basic interpretation of Grand Theft Auto‘s loose and seamless range of oddjobs and money-making schemes and, so far, hasn’t felt quite as varied or compelling — perhaps because the characters inhabiting this world aren’t the bizarre, subversive bunch of weirdos that seem to squirm out of every doorway in Liberty City.

Elsewhere, the driving works well. You can hijack any car you like and take it for a spin through the wide, arching streets, enjoying the easy, generous handling. There’s a decent variety of motors too from crumbing rusty fans to cool little coupes.

Again, though, a few hours in and I’m not getting the raw urgency of >GTA or Saint’s Row 2, I’m not getting the adrenaline rush or squeezing a muscle car through two cop wagons while Queen plays in the background. The world of Godfather II feels much more functional, stern and serious.

Like a lot of EA releases these days, Godfather II has some genuinely interesting ideas. The whole Don’s View concept, the management of an entire crime empire, feels compelling and well-balanced. The character progression — the fact that you can choose seven guys for your family and keep upgrading them with new skills and weapons — adds a real sense of humanity to the tactical drama. I haven’t got there yet, but Hunter Smith was telling me about the times when, later in the game, you’ll get the chance to recruit much more experienced and skillful characters, which will mean taking one of your seven guys out. In the bad, Mafia sort of way. You might have spent the last ten hours of gameplay building them up, spending cash to give them better health and other facets. But business is business. If a better guy comes along, someone has to make way.

I like the Monopoly angle on the Don’s View too. Essentially, there are two or more rackets of each type on every map. Once you have all the rackets of a certain ilk — eg, all the brothels or chop shops — you now own a crime ring, which brings extra benefits. Suddenly you’ll have a bulletproof vest or an armoured car, for example. It’s like sticking hotels on Mayfair and Park Lane.

But I can see why the game is pulling in mixed reviews. The visuals are sparse and dated to say the least (though the interiors, including some extremely plush hotels, are better), and already, the tasks are becoming a little repetitive. There’s always something on the go, but at times, without the narrative intricacy of GTA IV, you just feel like you’re ticking off items on a particularly bloody shopping list. We’ll see. – guardian.co.uk