The first The Godfather game from EA was hit or miss for some people.  Either you liked it a lot, or you hated it, there wasn’t much mediocrity when it came to the general consensus.  Apparently enough people loved it to justify producing a sequel though we know how EA can sometimes rehash games just because they can.

The deal with The Godfather II is this, you start relatively early in the game as a Don, you try to control other rival families territories, rinse and repeat.  It’s open world in the sense that before taking on any main mission you can choose to secure all of the rival families rackets for your own.  There are some side quests like doing favors for cops or city officials to gain favors from them but in the end there isn’t much value to doing the side jobs as the game is fairly easy.  You can also take on assassination side quests which will allow you key information in finding the rival family’s made men and killing them to make the final family campaign easier.

As a Don you have the ability to recruit people into your family and level them up as you go.  Increasing their skills like recovery and accuracy.  You can then promote your family members into key family positions that give them more specialties.  Some of the specialties are demolitions, engineer, arsonist and safe cracker.  Each specialty helps with different missions so it behooves the player to recruit a variety of family members.  You are also able to send your family on missions to take over other businesses without you, which proves worthy if you don’t feel like raiding an establishment on your own.  You can recruit 3 family members to follow you wherever you go, swapping them out for different specialties at your leisure.  The Godfather II still incorporates the ability to intimidate shop owners and perform assassinations as well.

The problem I had with The Godfather II honestly was an ethical problem.  I found the game fun and very entertaining, to the point that I wanted to and did finish it.  However the game is laced with profanities and female breast nudity.  The violence never does bother me but for some whom it does you will most likely have a problem with this game.  The graphics certainly are sub-par for a current generation game, they are shiny without much detail.  For a game like Grand Theft Auto 4 to have so much involved and still have decent graphics I am surprised that this game’s graphics weren’t better than they were.

Also not being a Godfather watcher, I was made aware that the voice acting was quite terrible.  I can’t imagine it being worse than the Bad Boys video game but as I said I never watched The Godfather.

Overall I would say that if you can stomach much of what I mentioned, the game is relatively fun.  However I would definitely caution parents who would buy this game for their 17 and under children.  Godfather II will give you about 8 to 10 hours of gameplay if you are a completionist, otherwise you can probably finish most of the story in 6 to 7 hours.