The Godfather is a lengthy open-world adventure game that shouldn't be missed out by any fan of the Godfather movies
The Godfather takes place in New York City back in the 1940s. You play as a peripheral character who wasn't in the film, but nevertheless, he plays a critical role in the story here. Surprisingly, he blends in well with the rest of the story, most of which is copied directly from the film. As soon as you begin the game, you'll be able to create your own mobster using a customization feature similar to those found in EA sports games. When you finally begin the game, your mobster is a little boy who watches his father get wasted by rival mobsters. Then the game flashes into the future a few years to the wedding scene from the opening of the film. Your mother asks the Don to give you some work, and since no Sicilian can refuse a request on his daughter's wedding day, he sends Luca Brasi to teach you how to become a mobster.
You become an unofficial enforcer for the Corleone family, and your job is to muscle store owners into paying you protection money. First you enter the store and talk to the owner. Usually he won't simply give in, so you'll have to intimidate him by smashing up his store or beating the crap out of him until he gets pushed to his breaking point. Once you take over a shop, you earn a weekly paycheck, and there's dozens of shops scattered throughout the five different areas of New York.
However, this won't be the only thing you can do. There are, of course, story missions to complete, most of which are taken directly out of the film. Driving the Don to the hospital after he's gunned down in the streets and traveling to Hollywood for the horse head scene are a few examples. Obviously, you can play the game like Grand Theft Auto and just run around the city shooting people or blow some stuff up.
Like I said before, this game borrows many aspects the Grand Theft Auto series is known for. You mainly go around the city jacking cars, running people over, shooting them at random, or being chased by the cops. Once you commit any sort of crime, your heat meter, or gauge, increases anywhere from one to five stars to alert you about how badly the cops want to take you down. You won't have to worry about the police too much since it's pretty easy to escape from them. You can actually bribe them into not chasing you, but since the cars in this game drive so well, you'll often times escape from the police with ease. If you somehow happen to get caught, you're killed and revived at the nearest hospital for a small fee.
Unfortunately, you die in this game far too often. A lot of the story missions are hard, mainly because you'll be fending off dozens of mobsters at one given time all by yourself. Just a single shotgun round can automatically take you out. That's the only major gripe I have with this game. It would've been helpful to have some sort of difficulty setting, like Easy, Normal and Hard, or something like that. You will find health tonics occasionally, but you'll mainly have to stay behind cover and plan your attacks wisely, which I think sucks a whole lot of the fun out.
The gunplay in The Godfather is definitely quite good if you strip out the hard difficulty setting. You can lock onto your enemies using the Right Trigger and take cover behind any solid object, much like in GTA 4. There is a free aiming mode, which makes the gunplay feel somewhat like a first-person shooter. You'll be using your typical 1940s guns. There's a tommy gun, a .38 revolver, a shotgun, and so on. There's also some grenade-like weapons such as Molotov cocktails, dynamite sticks and lead pipes. All the guns can be upgraded twice by arms dealers. You'll be able to harness all these weapons at one given time, which is extremely helpful during combat.
You don't always have to use guns, though. There's a hefty amount of executions to pull off. Basically you lock onto someone with a button and then use the Right Analog Stick to throw punches, slam them into a wall, or even throw them off buildings. You can also perform killing execution moves, like breaking someone's neck or strangling them. The combat overall is really fun. The enemy AI for the most part is good. They'll team up on you and duck behind objects for cover. There are some occasional AI problems with your enemies, such as an enemy putting away his gun; an enemy can just stand there and let you kill him; an enemy can be facing the opposite direction while still hitting you. Still, these things are by no means common occurrences, and I'm always more annoyed with a game having bad friendly AI, something that this game thankfully isn't filled with.
The Xbox 360 version looks better than the PS2 and Xbox versions of the game. Since the game's release date was in 2006, I can't help but forgive a few more graphical blemishes than I do now. The environment is nicely detailed, even though it doesn't look all that great. The frame rate, unfortunately, drops drastically when you're driving really fast while the cops are chasing you. The characters--especially the Don himself--look fantastic for a 2006 game, even though I can't say this was the best looking game to come out at that time, since Call of Duty 3, Gears of War, and The Godfather were all released around the same time. The audio is, as expected, excellent. The voice acting is definitely top notch, and although you'll hear the main theme a bit too often, it makes the experience feel all the more authentic.
With all of the many businesses to take over and story missions to complete, you can easily spend over 20 hours playing this game from start to finish. While the overall difficulty setting could've been considerably tuned down, the satisfying combat and the open-world game design make me look past that. Any fan of sandbox-style games like Grand Theft Auto or of the movie will find a lot to enjoy with The Godfather.