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March 12, 2006 | 9:58 PM PST
by: Shawn Sinclaire
At EA’s Community Day, we had the pleasure of getting an in-depth, hands-on of the upcoming EA title, The Godfather. The title will be available this month on the Xbox and PS2, with an Xbox 360 version coming in the future. Aside from graphical upgrades, the Xbox and PS2 version are identical and you can more or less bet on the 360 version being beefed up technically. Based on the popular movie of the same name, you play as a young mobster working his way up the ranks of the powerful Corleone family however you can. According to representatives at EA, this is one of the largest products they have ever worked on and it is also the first open world environment they have ever created. While most movie-based games immediately draw sneers from the hardcore gaming community, many of them will be blown away by The Godfather. Once you get sucked into the Corleone family, there’s no going back.
Many might think that The Godfather is based solely on the movie and will essentially take players through the movie’s plotline step by step, as many other movie titles do. However, the plot in the Godfather game is more parallel to that in the movie. Essentially you are playing scenes that were not shown in the movie (however, some of them are in the book), much like the plot for the ill-fated The Matrix. For example, in the movie there is a scene where Michael Corleone retrieves a gun from behind a toilet in a restaurant. In the game, you have a mission where you are the mobster sent to hide it there. This storyline works amazingly well, especially if you’ve seen the movie or read the book and wondered, “What the heck happened there?” EA was given a lot of creative freedom to fill in the plot holes, and they did it very well.
The gameplay is not unlike Grand Theft Auto. You begin as a lowly mobster who becomes entangled in the Corleone family and begins doing some of their dirty work for them. Some of this work includes high speed chases, assassinations, and business exploitations. Also like Grand Theft Auto, you have a huge world open to you and you can explore the vast majority of it. The city is buzzing with life and has many scenic areas worth exploring. You can steal cars, enter buildings, find secret Easter Eggs (sorry, no hot coffee), and work your way up in the world. On the technical side of things, The Godfather does look and play much like GTA, but don’t think they are clones. The Godfather has an entirely different aesthetic feel to the game. In GTA, you feel like an individual thug who goes around and does whatever he feels like. In The Godfather, everything you do is for the family.
Your character is something you can build and customize to your own specifications. The character editor is very powerful and allows for tons of detail, including how big you want your forehead to be. For those of you as impatient as this writer, there is a random feature that randomly generates facial proportions for you (I ended up with a character who looked like an Italian Johnny Depp from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Once you have your mobster created, you hit the streets and begin a simple mission where you beat up a couple of thugs. This becomes the first experience with the Black Hand combat system. When going hand to hand with a foe, you use the left trigger to lock on and the control stick to attack and dodge, somewhat like Fight Night 3’s total punch control. Using the R-trigger, you initiate a grab on your foe before pounding his skull in. With the control stick, your character will throw fists, knees, elbows, and even foreheads in the kind of dirty street fighting you’d expect in the mob. There are also multiple executions you can perform once you’ve weakened your opponent. The shooting is much the same, with the left trigger locking on and the right stick adjusting the aim. The shooting is much more in-depth than many titles of similar genre, as the enemies all have weak spots on their bodies that can be exploited. Shooting a guy in the shoulder forces them to lower their gun for example, while kneecapping them will render them immobile. Overall, the combat and shooting system is fairly fresh and easy to use.
Those combat skills come in handy for the various tasks you’ll be sent on. Just to skim the top, you can raid warehouses, follow the story mode, rob cars, do contract killings, partake in high speed chases, rob banks, and much, much more. The open world of The Godfather is enormous and lively. There are so many things to do in the city that you'd be hard pressed to find everything. All of these activities reward you with money and respect points as you help the Corleone family take over New York. Respect serves much like RPG levels in other titles. After getting so much respect, your level goes up and you can upgrade your character in a few different categories such as vitality and fighting ability. Respect is earned through completing missions, extorting money from businesses, and completing missions and hit contracts. The more respect you have, the easier negotiations become and, obviously, the better your stats level up.
Negotiations are some of the most entertaining parts of the game. Using the Y button with a variety of characters, you can persuade rival members to join your family, take over rackets (illegal businesses), bribe cops, and pull vital information. Often you’re going to find yourself talking to people who don’t want to talk back. You’ll throw them an insult and a demand, and they’ll reply with a “Screw you” and a slap across the face in some circumstances. But, as a member of the family, you don’t take that crap. You work the information out of them. Each person has a strength gauge of sorts that shows how much damage they can take before they crack and give you all the information you need. Some people are obvious pushovers, and will bend to you immediately. Others take quite a bit of persuasion. You can slap them around, pull a gun on them, break their stuff, or even take hostages in order to raise their gauge to eventually make them crack. Beating them up always works, eventually, but that’s messy and sometimes you may go overboard and kill them. Instead, you have to try to exploit your enemies’ weaknesses. A heavy guy with mob experience isn’t going to react to punches very much, but the skinny barber who probably has never been on the receiving end of an elbow certainly will. Shopkeepers, likewise, may not break easily with bullying, but if you bust up their merchandise? They’re ready to do anything to get you to leave their possessions alone. But you have to be careful, because each person has a snapping point where they stop caring about their life. Bring them to that point, and be prepared to fight. Even a little old lady will bust out the fisticuffs if you break one too many display cases. Negotiation is truly one of the most entertaining, most original parts of the game.
This mug ain't talkin'? Make 'em talk.
Of course, the title isn’t perfect. There are a lot of little nuances that stand out and often dull the gameplay. For example, in order to change your characters dress appearance, you have to save the game, exit, and reload to get access to the barber shop where you can dress your mobster. This simply does not make sense, because there are barbers and tailors all over the city. Why can’t you take over the business, and then walk in to get your hair cut anytime you’d like? Also, the traveling in the title become a little obnoxious as the city is spread out pretty well. The interstate driving is fast, but in the end it’s just a Sunday drive with some traffic to weave around if you’re not in the middle of a high speed chase. Five minutes later, you’ve finally arrived in Jersey, only to find you’ll end up heading back to Midtown in the other direction. Sadly, there’s no warp system in place at all. The enemy AI is sometimes pretty poor as well, especially once you get close. From a distance, they take cover and avoid fire pretty well, but if you charge them with your fists, they become pretty easy to dismantle. You could run into a pack of two or three guys and beat up one guy, while the other two held their firearms and politely waited to die.
Overall, The Godfather is like a version of Grand Theft Auto where everything is actually fun and everything matters. In The Godfather, every step you make has an effect on the family. You earn money for the family and you get a payback. You blow up some rival families, and you earn more respect. You can incite mob wars and bribe cops to get away with petty crimes. Killing innocent people? It doesn’t help the family, so you don’t gain anything from it other than a trip to prison. And, when you’re done with that, you can play the story mode if you want to and start seeing how the Corleone family develops. The story is good enough that if that’s all you wanted to do, you could, and would be satisfied with a 10-15 hour title. However, if you play the game the way it was meant to be played and complete a majority of the side quests and take over rival families, you’ll find yourself with well over 50 hours of gameplay, possibly even 100. While it has its flaws, most of them are fortunately nitpicky and not gameplay inhibiting.
The Godfather is not anything revolutionary. It’s basically an open-ended game with some great, original concepts and a strong story backend thanks to the movie. It has a great story, a vast city to explore, tons of missions and gameplay variety that fans will appreciate. Even those who have never seen The Godfather will find themselves kissing the ring of this title. Keep it on your radar.
Many might think that The Godfather is based solely on the movie and will essentially take players through the movie’s plotline step by step, as many other movie titles do. However, the plot in the Godfather game is more parallel to that in the movie. Essentially you are playing scenes that were not shown in the movie (however, some of them are in the book), much like the plot for the ill-fated The Matrix. For example, in the movie there is a scene where Michael Corleone retrieves a gun from behind a toilet in a restaurant. In the game, you have a mission where you are the mobster sent to hide it there. This storyline works amazingly well, especially if you’ve seen the movie or read the book and wondered, “What the heck happened there?” EA was given a lot of creative freedom to fill in the plot holes, and they did it very well.
The gameplay is not unlike Grand Theft Auto. You begin as a lowly mobster who becomes entangled in the Corleone family and begins doing some of their dirty work for them. Some of this work includes high speed chases, assassinations, and business exploitations. Also like Grand Theft Auto, you have a huge world open to you and you can explore the vast majority of it. The city is buzzing with life and has many scenic areas worth exploring. You can steal cars, enter buildings, find secret Easter Eggs (sorry, no hot coffee), and work your way up in the world. On the technical side of things, The Godfather does look and play much like GTA, but don’t think they are clones. The Godfather has an entirely different aesthetic feel to the game. In GTA, you feel like an individual thug who goes around and does whatever he feels like. In The Godfather, everything you do is for the family.
Your character is something you can build and customize to your own specifications. The character editor is very powerful and allows for tons of detail, including how big you want your forehead to be. For those of you as impatient as this writer, there is a random feature that randomly generates facial proportions for you (I ended up with a character who looked like an Italian Johnny Depp from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). Once you have your mobster created, you hit the streets and begin a simple mission where you beat up a couple of thugs. This becomes the first experience with the Black Hand combat system. When going hand to hand with a foe, you use the left trigger to lock on and the control stick to attack and dodge, somewhat like Fight Night 3’s total punch control. Using the R-trigger, you initiate a grab on your foe before pounding his skull in. With the control stick, your character will throw fists, knees, elbows, and even foreheads in the kind of dirty street fighting you’d expect in the mob. There are also multiple executions you can perform once you’ve weakened your opponent. The shooting is much the same, with the left trigger locking on and the right stick adjusting the aim. The shooting is much more in-depth than many titles of similar genre, as the enemies all have weak spots on their bodies that can be exploited. Shooting a guy in the shoulder forces them to lower their gun for example, while kneecapping them will render them immobile. Overall, the combat and shooting system is fairly fresh and easy to use.
Those combat skills come in handy for the various tasks you’ll be sent on. Just to skim the top, you can raid warehouses, follow the story mode, rob cars, do contract killings, partake in high speed chases, rob banks, and much, much more. The open world of The Godfather is enormous and lively. There are so many things to do in the city that you'd be hard pressed to find everything. All of these activities reward you with money and respect points as you help the Corleone family take over New York. Respect serves much like RPG levels in other titles. After getting so much respect, your level goes up and you can upgrade your character in a few different categories such as vitality and fighting ability. Respect is earned through completing missions, extorting money from businesses, and completing missions and hit contracts. The more respect you have, the easier negotiations become and, obviously, the better your stats level up.
Negotiations are some of the most entertaining parts of the game. Using the Y button with a variety of characters, you can persuade rival members to join your family, take over rackets (illegal businesses), bribe cops, and pull vital information. Often you’re going to find yourself talking to people who don’t want to talk back. You’ll throw them an insult and a demand, and they’ll reply with a “Screw you” and a slap across the face in some circumstances. But, as a member of the family, you don’t take that crap. You work the information out of them. Each person has a strength gauge of sorts that shows how much damage they can take before they crack and give you all the information you need. Some people are obvious pushovers, and will bend to you immediately. Others take quite a bit of persuasion. You can slap them around, pull a gun on them, break their stuff, or even take hostages in order to raise their gauge to eventually make them crack. Beating them up always works, eventually, but that’s messy and sometimes you may go overboard and kill them. Instead, you have to try to exploit your enemies’ weaknesses. A heavy guy with mob experience isn’t going to react to punches very much, but the skinny barber who probably has never been on the receiving end of an elbow certainly will. Shopkeepers, likewise, may not break easily with bullying, but if you bust up their merchandise? They’re ready to do anything to get you to leave their possessions alone. But you have to be careful, because each person has a snapping point where they stop caring about their life. Bring them to that point, and be prepared to fight. Even a little old lady will bust out the fisticuffs if you break one too many display cases. Negotiation is truly one of the most entertaining, most original parts of the game.
This mug ain't talkin'? Make 'em talk.
Of course, the title isn’t perfect. There are a lot of little nuances that stand out and often dull the gameplay. For example, in order to change your characters dress appearance, you have to save the game, exit, and reload to get access to the barber shop where you can dress your mobster. This simply does not make sense, because there are barbers and tailors all over the city. Why can’t you take over the business, and then walk in to get your hair cut anytime you’d like? Also, the traveling in the title become a little obnoxious as the city is spread out pretty well. The interstate driving is fast, but in the end it’s just a Sunday drive with some traffic to weave around if you’re not in the middle of a high speed chase. Five minutes later, you’ve finally arrived in Jersey, only to find you’ll end up heading back to Midtown in the other direction. Sadly, there’s no warp system in place at all. The enemy AI is sometimes pretty poor as well, especially once you get close. From a distance, they take cover and avoid fire pretty well, but if you charge them with your fists, they become pretty easy to dismantle. You could run into a pack of two or three guys and beat up one guy, while the other two held their firearms and politely waited to die.
Overall, The Godfather is like a version of Grand Theft Auto where everything is actually fun and everything matters. In The Godfather, every step you make has an effect on the family. You earn money for the family and you get a payback. You blow up some rival families, and you earn more respect. You can incite mob wars and bribe cops to get away with petty crimes. Killing innocent people? It doesn’t help the family, so you don’t gain anything from it other than a trip to prison. And, when you’re done with that, you can play the story mode if you want to and start seeing how the Corleone family develops. The story is good enough that if that’s all you wanted to do, you could, and would be satisfied with a 10-15 hour title. However, if you play the game the way it was meant to be played and complete a majority of the side quests and take over rival families, you’ll find yourself with well over 50 hours of gameplay, possibly even 100. While it has its flaws, most of them are fortunately nitpicky and not gameplay inhibiting.
The Godfather is not anything revolutionary. It’s basically an open-ended game with some great, original concepts and a strong story backend thanks to the movie. It has a great story, a vast city to explore, tons of missions and gameplay variety that fans will appreciate. Even those who have never seen The Godfather will find themselves kissing the ring of this title. Keep it on your radar.
November 20, 2009
