The Godfather II Hands-on Preview

On my way into the bakery, I stop to strangle a woman. She’s not part of the mission or anything, I’ve just suddenly been overcome by a desire to see how violent this game is. With a brief fiddle of triggers and the analogue thumbsticks, I wrap my hands around her throat and force her to her knees. Slowly I choke the life out of the poor woman, the controller vibrating in a grim simulation of her heartbeat. Eventually, I break her neck. To be honest, I feel a bit sick – but at least one thing has been made clear: Godfather II is every bit as nasty as its predecessor.

Few people would argue with the assertion that EA’s first Godfather game was a surprisingly decent release. In principle, it seemed that there was a lot that could go wrong: movie adaptations are tricky beasts at the best of times – and given that the license in question is arguably the best film of all time, it seemed near impossible for the project to be anything but a travesty. As it turned out, what we got was a pretty decent third-person action game, a gangster game that added a degree of strategic empire-building to its GTA-style antics. In what seems like smart move, it’s this aspect that EA has chosen to expand upon for the sequel.

Last time around we were wearing the blood-spattered spatz of Aldo Trapani, a low-level thug working for the Corleone Family who eventually worked his way up to the position of Don of New York. This time we take on the role of Dominic, the lucky wiseguy who gets picked to take over when Trapani eats a lead salad at the start of the game. In short, you’ll start out as the man in charge. You’ll get to build up a crew using men you hand-pick yourself, promote people to senior roles within your own miniature crime family, and send them out to bomb or takeover properties belonging to your rivals. When your mob goes out on these missions you’ll be able to monitor proceedings using the Don’s View mode, a screen that gives a strategic overhead perspective on the city. On the other hand, you might want to keep a close eye on things yourself. If you head to the area in question when an attack is underway, you’ll be able to watch or lend a hand yourself. It’s a cool idea, one that could potentially form a strong bridge between the game’s action and RTS elements.

As with the last Godfather, assets under your control will provide a steady stream of cash, but now there’s an added tactical edge in the form of Crime Rings: if you manage to hold all the properties within the same nefarious industry – all the vice-related buildings, for example – then you’ll gain an additional bonus to assist your men in their turf war: controlling the city’s firearms supply will let you carry more ammunition, while other possible benefits include access to beefed-up armoured cars. Of course, your rival families are trying to do the same thing, so much of your income will have to be reinvested in guards to protect what you capture. Your enemies operate under the exact same structure you do – so if one family is giving you a particularly hard time, it might be worth targeting some of their top men. Taking out a rival made-man will send them to the hospital, taking them out of action for a couple of in-game weeks; to kill them permanently you’ll need to figure out their weakness, the one way of attacking them that will finish them off for good. Perhaps you’ll need to throw them off a building, or maybe you’ll have to burn them to death. Whatever the key method, you’ll have to work it out by trial and error or by doing a side mission to gain intelligence from someone in the know. Or you could just go on GameFaqs… but that’s cheating.

As cool as all this sounds, we’ve yet to really try any of it for ourselves. This is because our recent, (fleeting) hands-on saw us grab a quick thirty minutes at the very start of the game. On the plus side, this gave us the ability to check out the quality of the combat and the mafioso cutscenes – two elements that will still need to shine if Godfather II is to please the fans. The latter certainly seem to be in good shape: Robert Duvall has returned to voice consigliere Tom Hagen, and several of the film’s other cast members have also lent out their larynxes. Al Pacino is a notable exception of course – but if EA had blown its budget on the big man himself, the resultant game would probably look like pong. For purists, the real test will be how the developers have handled the rather complex tone and structure of The Godfather Part II. The last game did a fairly good job of recreating scenes from the first film, but since the sequel is a far more complicated piece of work we’re not expecting this to be one of the game’s strongest suits. Having said that, we do know that the action will attempt to mimic the film’s diverse locations, with three separate game-worlds set in New York, Florida and Miami, plus a training level in Cuba.

And if nothing else, the game’s combat engine has lost none of its enthusiasm for vicious creativity. The wonderfully named Black Hand 2.0 system once again uses the right analogue stick to allow a free-flowing approach to violence, with attacks mapped to appropriate motions: flicking down then up unleashes a particularly antisocial-looking headbutt. Firing guns at different parts of an opponent’s body will reward the player with anatomically-appropriate responses, so enemies can be disarmed with arm-shots or brought to their knees by targeting their legs. Bloodthirsty players will also have another broad selection of execution styles to master, varying with weapon types and the precise state of your victim when you finish them off. We weren’t playing the game for long, but we still managed to pull off one move where we stamped on a mobster’s throat, and another where we shoved a tommy gun into someone else’s mouth. Fun for all the family… provided that all the family is over 18.

Godfather II is due to be released pretty soon, so it won’t be that long before we get our Black Hand on some final review code. EA has clearly put the effort in with its cutscenes and combat, but it’s the new gameplay elements that will determine whether this sequel gains a similar reception to its forebear. As we say, we’ve yet to try out the strategic side of the business – but we’re hoping that they’re going to add another dimension of depth to what might otherwise be another GTA-like game, albeit one with the best gangster licence in history. If EA does good, the dev team will be made men; if it doesn’t… we’ll be on the phone to our friends in the “waste management” industry. Capiche?

The Godfather II will be released on February 27, on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.