Short and sweet. Not an award-winner, but very fun.
Story (6): You play as a customizable mobster named Dominic, who is chosen by Don Michael Corleone to fill in for him on the east coast while he goes out west. After a prologue in pre-revolution Cuba, you start out in a fairly generic-looking New York, which unlike the first game, bears little resemblance to the actual city (more on that later). You end up going on to Florida and Cuba, encounter characters from the movie, like Hyman Roth, and try to make a name for yourself by taking over other family territories and establishments.
Although some of it follows close to the movie, the story parts are very spread out over the course of the game, leaving you with a pretty open-ended crime sim that allows you to manage guards, make weekly earnings, and recruit / whack every made man in your family. It is a fairly short quest (20-30 hours is all it took me on the first try), but an action packed one. Though the built-in story is light, the flexibility allows you to make your own story quite easily. It could be a different story each time you play. - 6/10
Setting (8): First off, the game is divided into 3 areas, and all the areas in the game have the same names as real places. The 3 areas' names are Cuba (actually Havana), New York, and Florida (Miami). That said, their layout is more of a miniature game zone than a realistically laid-out city. The architecture, cars, pedestrians, and general AI are different from place to place. Florida has a Miami Beach resort look to it, much like Vice City from GTA. New York pretty much looks like one of New York City's five boroughs, though the buildings in the game are not too tall. Cuba is a well done area, and really feels different from the two American areas. Cops are dressed in green military uniforms and drive around in green military vehicles. They are also much more aggressive than those in New York and Florida.
The people in each city are also very different. Cubans look kind of poor and oppressed, while the New Yorkers look and act street-savvy, and the Floridians are more carefree and casual. This is better than the variety found in San Andreas, and the trips between cities are much faster and the cities more condensed and easier to traverse. 8/10
Gameplay and interface (8): What good is creating a crime family if you can't control it and easily access your businesses and keep track of what stores you need to take over?
Like I said before, you can recruit your own crime family. Each made man will have one (or sometimes or two) specialties to start out. These include lockpicking, demolitions, arson, medical, and brawling. Each mobster also comes with a little backstory and a weapons skill ranking, which can be improved through online play.
Over the course of the game, you will need to shoot targets, and quickly switch between weapons. This is fairly easy in Godfather 2, but also easy for the enemy AI, so it is pretty challenging. You can be killed pretty quickly if you don't watch it, so being on your toes or having a medic around is a must. While the gang warfare is fun and challenging, the game offers very little in the way of "bosses". Even the first Godfather had a cool final mission where you had to eliminate all the Dons. In this game, Dons and other story bosses are painfully easy, and some offer no fight at all! Makes you wonder how these high-ranking criminals and government agents kept their spot all those years. I will give the game credit for making elimination of other made men challenging and fun. You have to find people on the streets, do favors for them, and then follow a strict guideline for eliminating the mobster or they respawn after a short stay in the hospital.
Now if only they would let you jump... 8/10
Overall (7): This game is not the greatest out there by any stretch of the imagination, but it offers a short, fun hands-on crime management sim with a story from a very good movie thrown in. I think rating this game a 4 is a little harsh, but it's definitely not up to par with the movie franchise it is associated with. Maybe that's why this site's reviewers felt the way they did.
7/10