The Godfather II (Xbox 360)

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Multiplayer details are currently being kept close to EA's chest

He wants us to create a crime scene for himself - a basic sabotage job at Elite Diner. Via the Don View we see that there's only four guys protecting it - easy pickings. We climb into a car and make our way to the target where we quickly start beating everyone, and everything, up. It's all extremely violent, echoing the first game. We see brutal execution moves - one, burning someone's head in an oven, is particularly eye-watering. You're not alone either - the AI-controlled crew members will automatically follow your lead, throwing their weight around in response to your violent actions. You can direct them to go, or come back, in a hard or soft manner, forcing them to stop what they're doing or wait till they're finished. "We really wanted to make them smart, useful. We didn't want you to have to micro-manage them in the game."

Once the place is appropriately trashed we start intimidating the head of the racket - "All right! You'll get your money!" he screams. This place is well and truly under Corleone control. On a job like this, with messy murder everywhere, you'll have to deal with witnesses. Here, you have a number of options - get a bruiser to intimidate them, buy their silence or kill them, although if there are witnesses to that murder you might be in for a long night.

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During the scrap we see messages flash up on screen, informing you of events that are happening elsewhere on the map. It's a lovely touch and reinforces the feeling that the game world is getting on with itself as rival families knock lumps out of each other. "Something will happen that makes you think, shit, do I need that perk?" Hunter says, smiling.

For those of you worrying that Godfather II has now become more of a strategy game than an action sandbox, fear not. While strategy is important it's still an action game at heart, and you'll spend most of your time doing the kinds of open world action game things you'd expect.

Hunter predicts a single-player experience (like GTA 4 there's no campaign co-op in Godfather II) of between 15 and 25 hours...

"We wanted to get that feel of an RTS, like s$!t what's going on next? What do I want to do? But without having the over complication," Hunter reassures. "We tried to borrow some elements of RPG in terms of upgrading skills and attributes of players without going layers deep, just enough to give you that sensation of being a Don."

Speaking of time, Hunter predicts a single-player experience (like GTA 4 there's no campaign co-op in Godfather II) of between 15 and 25 hours, in direct contrast to the 80-100 hours packed in to Rockstar's epic. But that's not including the multiplayer side of the game, which EA isn't revealing too much about right now. We wouldn't be doing our jobs properly if we didn't at least ask, right?

"The key differentiator for multiplayer is taking the crew guys you develop in your single-player game and you play as them inside the multiplayer experience," Hunter explains. "You also make families online, and the guy can play as the Don. The Don has what we call 'Don Control', so he's like the director inside the game, he's got a view, is using VOIP and markers to tell people what to do inside the game. He can wager his single-player money and make a bet against another Don. The winner takes all and divides that among the guys in the family and they all take that back into their single-player.

We're hoping the game will receive a bit of a graphical polish before its release early in 2009

"If you play as say an Arsonist in Firestarter mode, as you have more success in that mode you'll earn certain levels of success, you can take that back to single player and you'll have access to things you didn't have access to before. Things feed back and forth in single-player and multiplayer." Interesting stuff.

"We have this process at EA we call 'The X'," Hunter explains as our demo wraps up. "The X is really defining what is the vision for the game. Can that be clearly communicated? Do your features back that up or are they really hitting the player's fantasy? And can that be marketed and communicated to the player? Our X is 'act like a mobster, think like a Don'. We think in Godfather one we did a pretty good job of acting like a mobster. And now we've put in a layer of thinking like a Don, which is about building your family, making strategic decisions, taking the organised crime rings and owning all of them, taking the other families and figuring out how you're going to defeat all of them."

It's great to see a refreshing take on the open world GTA-style genre. If we have one concern, it is that the RTS and RPG elements might detract from the core Godfather experience. We're not big fans of Risk-style meta-games intruding in our core RTS experience. Could Godfather II's RTS meta-game get in the way of simply farting about, what we love most about these types of games? It's difficult to tell at this point. But we do know something - we've always fancied ourselves as a Don, and Godfather II looks like it'll provide our best chance to realise that fantasy yet.

Godfather II is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in February 2009.

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