The Godfather II (Xbox 360)

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As in any good free-roaming game, cars make an appearance.

"We're very true to the overarching Godfather 2 storyline," says Hunter. "You get the opportunity to be in some of those same scenes. Last time you were a low level guy moving your way up through the ranks. This time you start out as an underboss and you quickly become a Don with your own small family. When you're in these scenes you're in charge. You're not just the guy on the side. You get to have control over where things are going."

As we said at the top of the preview, Godfather II fuses traditional open world elements with RTS and RPG elements. The RPG bits come from your ability to level up your crew - goons hired that you can take with you during your own missions, assign to go out and cause havoc elsewhere while you're off doing Don-style stuff or order to defend crime rings you already have under your control. Supplementing their 15 attributes, which you can spend cash on upgrading, crew members also have specialities, like bruiser (good fighter) engineer (can cut fences) and arsonist (does what he says on the tin), which you can set as you promote them.

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All your crew members have a background as well as a personality. Say, for example, one of your guys has a knack of never getting picked up by the cops. If you get arrested while out causing trouble with the lads, he'll get out of jail right away while the rest of your crew stew behind bars for a full game week.

The strategy elements, the 'Don View', the levelling up, the action, it's all part of making you, the player, feel like a real life mob boss, like Marlon Brando in the first film. It's about feeling in control, about making big decisions and commanding respect. "We look at the other games in this space as being disorganised crime," says Hunter. "You're a street guy, you're doing whatever we tell you to do next in the game but you're not making overarching decisions. We try to give you a family that you've got to create and a strategic view that you make decisions from to help drive you in the action game."

Hunter boots up a live demo to show us how all of this plays out in practice. We're five hours into the game, invited by Roth down to Miami, with a small family under our belt and five guys working for our green. Our objective here is to take over the city's gun-running rackets. Do this, or monopolise any racket, and you'll be rewarded with a perk, in this case bulletproof vests for our entire crew, or, in RPG speak, a 50% health increase. There are plenty more - monopolise the diamond smuggling racket and all your guys will start firing juicy Magnums.

What kind of difficult decisions will you need to make?

We arrive at a night club that's in our control. It's day time now so it's almost empty (the game will have a dynamic day night system, as you'd expect, which affects not only the game world but how the AI goes about its business). Controlling businesses like this one will be an important factor in your success - they're fronts for money laundering and act as cash-making multipliers to supplement the money you generate from your established crime rings.

We switch into 'Don View'. Area under our control is red, with other colours designating rival strongholds. Three gun-running rackets are already part of the Corleone family, leaving just one left to be 'convinced' to join the fold. It sounds like a simple case of heading over there and causing havoc, but it's not - being a Don requires a surprising amount of forethought. "The other families realise what we're doing," Hunter explains. "Once we attack that last one they're going to attack our guys, so we need to set up our defences."

From the Don View we can see that our target is being heavily defended by 14 men. Hunter outlines our options. We can either take out some of the family's businesses or figure out how to eliminate their guys by doing favours for other people in positions of power. In Godfather II, if you do favours for people they'll give you favour cards which you can play any time you want. Hunter chooses the latter.

The target of our affection is the Miami district attorney. If we do a favour for him he'll give us a sting card, which, when we play it, causes him to fabricate a crime scene in order to frame our rival, putting him out of action. The DA is currently down the local porn shop, Luscious Entertainment, a regular haunt of his. Via a cut scene we explain the situation and ask if he needs our help with anything. Turns out he does.

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