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The Godfather(PC) (M) (Action) |
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An offer anyone could refuse.
When EA announced they were going to make a Godfather game, jaws dropped everywhere. First off, the books and movies are absolutely phenomenal- which was really great. But then again, we were all confused. Would you play through the movies? Would you be independent of the whole Godfather saga? What in the hell was going on?
Tons of screenshots later, we were all sold on the concept of the Godfather, and most importantly, the game coming with it. The 3D Model of Don Corleone (Marlon Brando)was enough to make one jump up and start throwing money out then and there. The whole game was beautiful looking in those screenshots- and if you would have asked me a month or two ago, I would have said the same thing. But, now the game is out. Now, very few people agree with me on this, but I hate EA. I think EA is basically a mill for video games, chaining their developers to desks and creating sub standard games at an alarming rate. And again my theory is proven, with absolutely no doubt regarding this game. Why? Let me count the ways. When I booted up The Godfather, I was greeted with a grainy rendition of the opening of the Godfather (Actually, just the title and the music, you get the idea). This had me excited like a little schoolgirl- I was playing The Godfather, and I was totally ready to bust some heads in. So, I hit the start button- and things started going downhill from there. In the Godfather, the game essentially plays out like an irritating GTA clone. And by clone, I mean every single bit of this game, from the game layout to the control scheme, plays like Grand Theft Auto, without any kind of difference or modification. Turn on GTA and replace everything you see with old New York and you have this game in a nutshell. The gameplay is similar in every single facet- I'll get into what you actually do later, but suffice to say that this game is so close to GTA, that I felt like I should randomly beat up people and listen to funny radio discussions. Even the radar is shaped similarly- the GUI only went minor changes, which hurts me even more inside, because I would at least expect a difference in style.  The Godfather works like this- you create a character and get injected into the story like a virus. Miscellaneous parts of the story happen as you participate in them, crawling through the story in it's mission based format at a quick, readers-digest-condensed-version-of-Mario-Puzo kind of progression. For example, in the scene where Luca Brazi ends up getting killed, instead of it simply ending, the enemies see you and you have a firefight. While this is an interesting way to make the movies a game, it ends up making it somewhat corny and stupid, and insulting to the original concept of the game. The other half of this game generally falls under pure and simple GTA style gameplay. As I mentioned before, the game is exactly the same in every single way, so all it leaves you to do, for the most part, is everything you've seen in GTA games. For example, in the Godfather, one of your constant, never-changing missions is to get people to “pay out” to the Corleones. Of course, this always ends up to the point where you take their head and smash it on the counter until they say “OK”, but you get the idea. This simply means most of your time will be spent running around town, bursting into a random establishment, and beating the stuffing out of the proprietor and making him agree to pay out. As well, it seems that Little Italy is truly a hellhole, because every single business has a back room racketeering scheme of some kind, and you are expected to go back there and clean it up as well. This gets boring, because all it means is that after pounding the shopkeeper, you just whip out a gun, bust open the door, and shoot anyone looking funny at you. Again in a feat of complete unoriginal gameplay, part of The Godfather will be your ability to hide from cops and pay them off. Just like in the very game it ripped off, The Godfather will keep track of your wanted level, and if you go under a certain level a bribe can take, you'll be hunted down by the cops. This isn't really a big loss, because just like in the Grand Theft Auto series, it simply requires you to grab a car, go to a safe house, enter and exit.  The biggest hit about The Godfather, though, was the graphics. While the cityscapes are absolutely phenomenal, everything in the game- from the characters to the sky- was horribly textured to the point where it is all muddy and extremely ugly. The textures are not completely done well or bump mapped, which means they look flat and boring, but they also tend to have drab colors and obviously done lines to the point where I wondered if they were created in MS Paint. If you notice all of the shots for the marketing of this game, they are all from a distance- well, when you actually play the game, this happy little distance isn't there, and you will have to put up with cruddy textures for the whole game. The models are nothing phenomenal either, being somewhat blocky and bad, even when I had the graphics to the absolute max the game would allow- even AntiAliasing up to 16x. This is quite disappointing, especially considering the wonderful graphics we saw in the pictures- but it's like about any EA game, the game was made with some shortcuts, and it shows. But, as I said, there are some good things about this game, it's just not exactly in the departments that would make this game a must buy. This game's environments are in Video Game Art competitions for a good reason- the renditions of New York, especially Little Italy, are spot on beautiful, and near perfect. The ambiance you get from these locations is just like watching the movies, a refreshing touch to the game that made me keep playing it, if not only to just see the different areas.  The Godfather, like Grand Theft Auto, is actually a reasonably long game. This surprises no-one, being as the movies themselves were extremely long, but it still is a nice touch. The game gets old like any game (Except faster), and it definitely is not something I can see myself replaying, but it is long, and while EA seems to have skimped out on harder parts like the graphics and the gameplay, they at least made the effort to have tons of missions and objectives, so if you can ignore the graphics, you will be spending a long time on this game to get anywhere in it. One last note about this game- While the Godfather movies were by no means clean and family friendly, EA has, for some reason, decided to make this game more graphic than the movies, to the point where it can be actually somewhat overdone. While the movies rarely (If at all, I never remember them using it) used the F bomb, this game uses it somewhere along the lines of 20 times in a normal gaming session. Not to mention the blood and the general violence portrayed in this game, but it also comes with a gentle helping of sexuality (Not nudity, more along the lines of comments by the women) and misplaced action (Like explosions for no real reason). It seems like EA missed the sort of refined ambiance that the movies had- sure, you had people killing each other, but that doesn't mean you have to be gratuitous about it. The Godfather is a good concept for a game, but it fails in every part that mattered. The fact that the game basically takes three great movies and turns them into a sideshow, a poorly done Grand Theft Auto clone, is actually somewhat insulting to the series. The game has no real redeeming factor to it, and except for the beautiful environments, there was not a time when I could honestly go “This game was well made”. Sure, you can see EA put the work into it- but nowhere near the thought or consideration to carry the great series on with a new media. If you've played this game once, you've probably played it enough- go spend your time watching the movies or reading the books, not playing this game.
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