The Godfather Game Review - An offer you can't refuse.

 By Sam Coles:

The Godfather is one of my favourite films ever and is an absolute classic when it comes to Mafioso story telling. When I found out back in 2005 that there was a game based on the films was coming out I was a bit sceptical as most movie licenced games are generally radioactive waste. However The Godfather was actually a decent open world game (at the time) with plenty to do and fun side activities to partake in.

The Godfather game follows a nameless grunt in the Corleone family, it follows scenes from the movie and shows the background activities you did not see in the movie such as how the gun was planted behind the toilet in the restaurant etc. You can customise the look of your character from facial hair, hair styles and of course a large selection of suits to fit the Mafioso theme.

The gameplay is an open world game where you roam around completing various missions for the family or you can go around shooting people who look at you funny. The real fun is extorting businesses where you shakedown shop owners for protection money, this is great because each shopkeeper have their weakness, you can get money just by talking to them, roughing up their customers or my favourite destroying their inventory. This will result in you gaining daily payment straight to you where you can spend on new clothes and weapons, which will have different levels of effectiveness from your standard tommy gun to the level 3 annihilator.

The controls of the hand to hand combat is extremely brutal as you use the left and right triggers to grab your target and then use the right stick to pull off different punches and kicks depending on their stance.  You can also strangle them to death by pushing both thumb sticks in and it really feels as if you’re choking the life out of someone. Once you’ve got your enemy down to a certain amount of health you can use the “Blackhand”. What this does is that you can pull off brutal executions and this can range from snapping necks to putting a gun to the back of their head and pulling the trigger.

Visually the game is very drab and it's not very impressive compared to other games of the era, the character models are lackluster and the car models are bare bones. Overall the presentation has not aged well at all.

The only real problem I have with this game is that the driving does struggle to be engaging as it feels very floaty and turning corners is very sensitive. Another issue is that the shooting is very stiff and the cover system is very archaic and to be fair this game was released the same year as Resident Evil 4 which perfected the formula at the time.

The Godfather game is a decent open world movie tie in game with great action, fun gameplay with extorting shopkeepers and brutal combat. You can get this game on PS2, PS3, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360 and PC so there are a lot of systems to choose from to play it and it’s very cheap to pick up these days.