The Godfather

The emphasis on driving, the lack of scope in the side-quests, and the subsequent compulsion to complete the main mission, are definite weak spots in the game, the result being that players will all to easily get bogged down in the general repetitiveness of the experience.

For any other legacy, this game would be just fine. For the iconic Godfather series, it really could have been something with more of a Brando weight. But even though it's more of a Tony Soprano, The Godfather: The Game still manages to deliver a solid gangster experience.

The individual mechanics come together reasonably well with none being brilliant or outstanding but once you get the way that the game encourages you to play, it works out reasonably well. It's just too bad that it doesn't really hit the peaks that you'd expect.

The game itself is an uneven mishmash of fighting, driving, and shooting. Call it Grand Theft Goodfellas; if someone took Rockstar Games' popular Grand Theft Auto series, moved its setting to New York, and then sent it via the Wayback machine to post-World War II New York, the result would be The Godfather.

While it features an innovative, easy-to-use melee combat system and some interesting campaigns, it's ultimately hurt by boringly repetitive side missions and some underwhelming environments.

Adapting one of Hollywood's masterpieces was brave, but it's a pity the game designers lacked the courage of their convictions, choosing to shoehorn Grand Theft Auto into the mafia setting.

The melee fighting and driving are bland, as are the environments, but the story is compelling and the acting is impeccable. For forty dollars it's a good offer, but not one you can't refuse.

It's all beautifully violent yet terminally one-dimensional once the story wraps. [May 2006, p.73]

The fighting in all its forms proves to be a sticking point, and Godfather suffers accordingly. [May 2006, p.49]

It is not a game you will blow through in 2 days, but I spent about 7 hours a day on it and beat it in about 6 days.

A game that offers a decent amount of fun, with great combat, occasionally inspired set-pieces, but sub-par driving and a half-baked story mode with barely enough variety to fill a long evening.

EA has turned it into a story about gain. Whereas the motive of violence was once to illustrate Michael's downward spiral, here it is merely a tool with which to boost your bank balance. [May 2006, p.118]

A huge, lazy and sometimes glitchy disappointment of a game. The character progression really doesn't provide a strong enough excuse to keep playing after the initial joy of the combat has dissipated, and the number of times you find yourself going through the same old motions during missions smacks of padding of a magnitude normally associated with the corpulent Don.

But too many things come up short, like the haphazard combat and gun systems and the fact that most of the missions run the same, with the dumbest cops in the world getting outran and you getting the best of goons.