The Godfather II

by Electronic Arts

Product Features

• Relive the greatest moments from "The Godfather II" in an open-world action experience inspired by the movie.
• Act like a mobster to command respect, intimidating and extorting business owners and rival families with devastating new attacks and executions.
• Recruit, develop, and promote members of your crime family. Recruit your friends to join your family and take them into battle online to find out who is the Don of Dons.
• Bring up to three crew members along on jobs, including an arsonist, demolitions expert, safecracker, and more. Command their actions in battle and unleash their specialties on your enemies.
• Be a true Don as you coordinate all the action using a 3D world map: survey your turf, place defenses on businesses, analyze crime patterns, identify new illicit racket monopolies, and choose the target of your next attack.

Product Details

• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B001GGO1FW
• Item Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Media: DVD-ROM
• Release Date: April 7, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,262 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com Product Description

Inspired by the events of the classic film of the same name, in The Godfather II players take on the role of Dominic Corleone, a little-known member of the Corleone crime family tasked with rebuilding the once dominant, but now faltering mafia empire. Set in an open-world gameplay universe full of dangers and opportunities, players must maintain and develop the Corleone crime family's resources using every and all means available if they hope in the end to prevail in the ultimate challenge, to act like a mobster, but think like a Don.

Become Don Dominic Corleone. View larger.

Command a crew of three. View larger.

'The Don's View' in action. View larger.

Enjoy open-world gameplay. View larger.

Take your family online. View larger.

Story
On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a major mob meeting in Havana takes a bloody turn. The Don of your family is killed in Cuba, leaving it to you to take the reigns and lead your battered organization and reestablish the Corleone powerbase in Queens. Success breeds opportunity: after you've proven you have the chops to run a top-tier crime organization, Hyman Roth invites you to expand and support him in South Florida. Do you accept his offer or do you remain loyal to the Corleones? Things get even more complicated when Michael Corleone comes under investigation by a Senate Committee on Organized Crime, and you're tapped to run the Family with support from Tom Hagen. Whatever decisions you make, you must build up your arsenal, command your crew, and establish and maintain power... or face the consequences. Stack your pockets with favors from those in positions of influence as you fight off attacks and strike back at your rivals. As the Godfather there will be a price on your head and a target on your back, but don't take it personally. After all, it's only business.

The Don's View
Be a true Don as you coordinate all the action using a 3D world map: survey your turf, place defenses on businesses, analyze crime patterns, identify new illicit rackets, and choose the target of your next attack. As the Don of a family, there are a ton of strategic choices to make in The Godfather 2. Just one example are Monopolies. Monopolies are groupings of rackets that "run" the same criminal activity. Controlling, and defending a monopoly comes with both a monetary bonus and game perk benefits making them key to owning the map, gaining wealth and amassing power. Monopolies can be local to one city or span across the cities. Larger monopolies made up of many targets, spanning multiple cities are obviously more difficult but offer greater rewards. Other in-game rackets include: Fronts - extortable legitimate businesses of the game that provide payouts as well as money laundering opportunities; and Small, Medium and Large Rackets - venues containing an illegal criminal activity and usually disguised as legitimate businesses. These three require various degrees of muscle to defend and keep under your control.

Key Game Features:

• Build Your Family - Recruit, develop, and promote members of your crime family.
• Command a Crew - Bring up to three crew members along on jobs, including an arsonist, demolitions expert, safecracker, and more. Command their actions in battle and unleash their specialties on your enemies.
• The Don's View - Be a true Don as you coordinate all the action using a 3D world map: survey your turf, place defenses on businesses, analyze crime patterns, identify new illicit racket monopolies, and choose the target of your next attack.
• Blackhand Brutality - Act like a mobster to command respect, intimidating and extorting business owners and rival families with devastating new attacks and executions.
• Bring Your Family Online - Recruit your friends to join your family and take them into battle online to find out who is the Don of Dons.
• 'It's Only Business' - Relive the greatest moments from The Godfather II in an open-world action experience inspired by the movie.

Commanding Your Crew
There are six ranks within each family, starting with the Don. As the Don you will have a right hand man, your Consigliere Tom Hagen, who will teach you the ropes and advise you on how to take down the other families. The rest of your family is comprised of an Underboss, Capos, Soldiers and Associates. These are the men who guard your interests and follow your orders without question. Members of your family within these ranks, known as Made Men, possess exclusive skills and specialties that can be taken into battle. Direct them wisely and upgrade them to develop their specialties and increase the power of your organization. But beware. Each rival family has it’s own family tree as well. Learning how to hunt down and permanently eliminate their Made Men will be critical to your success.

Take Your Family Online in Multiplayer Modes
Play The Godfather II online multiplayer modes and become the true Don of Dons. Take your money, weapons, and crew from your singleplayer experience online and wage mob warfare against players around the world. Play as one of your family’s Made Men and put your best strategies to the test as you battle for riches and honors that transfer back and forth between your singleplayer campaign. Some available modes include:

Fire Starter Game Mode - Arsonist crew members attempt to destroy as much as possible in a race to reach the scoring limit.

Safe Cracker Mode - Safe cracker crew members attempt to find safes throughout the map. Cracking them earns your team points and money.

Demolition Assault Mode - Use your demolitions specialty to destroy the enemy’s three assault points.

Team Deathmatch - The bloodiest mode and so not for the squeamish. Team with most kills wins.

System Requirements:

	Minimum Specifications:
OS:	Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows XP Service Pack 2
Processor:	Pentium 4 2.8GHz, AMD CPU - Athlon 64 3000+ or equivalent
RAM:	2GB (Windows XP & Windows Vista)
Video Card:	ATI & Intel Graphics Card, Radeon X1600 Series or equivalent
Sound Card:	100% DirectX 9.0c compliant card
Hard Drive Space:	9GB of free space
Other:	Internet connection required for multiplayer

Product Description

On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a major mob meeting in Havana takes a bloody turn. The Don of your family is killed, and you must take the reigns and lead your battered organization. Success breeds opportunity, so when Michael Corleone comes under investigation by a Senate Committee on Organized Crime, the Corleone Family calls upon you to reestablish its operation in New York and expand into a new territory -- Miami. Build up your arsenal, build alliances, and make whatever deals you need to as you fight off attacks and strike back at your rivals. There’ll be a price on your head and a target on your back, but don’t take it personally. After all, it’s only business.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes., April 8, 2009

By 

Cosmos (Clearwater, FL United States) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Godfather II (DVD-ROM)

This Godfather II provides an entertaining but ultimately lacking "mobster" experience. While the single-player campaign offers an engaging yet all too linear experience, multi-player fails fans and hopeful gamers with a narrowly focused combat-centric set of game modes that drops the strategic elements that make the single player side so much more interesting.

The single-player game contains several features that provide the best part of the Godfather II game. Namely, the strategic and "Don view" overlay, family management, and a somewhat open-ended game world in which the player must exert their will on opposing AI mafia families.

While the single player experience will likely take most gamers around 30 to 40 hours to complete, a notable degree of linearity exists that causes the replayability to diminish quickly. This is in part due to its focus on plot and story telling--not a bad thing on its own--but also because of a general lack of randomness.

This lack of randomness extends into aspects you wouldn't necessarily expect to see, including the pool of possible family recruits and the static nature of businesses (aka "crime rings"). This is somewhat offset by the fairly large game world consisting of three major locales (a small New York region, a large Florida region, and a moderately sized Cuba region), altogether offering a fair number of overall business locations and number of recruitable associates that will take some time to explore completely.

The game play itself has a familiar feel that manages to feel a bit novel at the same time. While it is fun to hear the commentary as your crew smashes a cafe or gives the smack down to opponents, both the one-liners and the game play strays into repetitiveness by about mid-game. Upgrading your men and finding weapon upgrades does nothing to escape this and the strategic side of the game also ceases to expand by this same point. In otherwords, you'll be repeating more or less the same activities you were at the beginning of the game without any hope of those options and actions being expanded upon as you continue. It is what it is, nothing more and nothing less.

Some short cuts in the game design also manage to "whack" the sense of immersion and general depth of the setting, cheapening the game experience alongside. That is, some aspects have a distinct "gaminess" that is hard to overlook and, if abused, makes the game both too easy and a lot less fun. Examples include safehouse abuse and the ability to "shortcut" (via engineers, bruisers, or similar path-enabling family members) your way to business owners who must be, erm ... convinced ... that they should work for you. This latter aspect can allow you to utterly side step defenders of the location, convince the business owner to switch sides, and then immediately recruit in an army of defenders of your own--taking over some locations in literally seconds flat. Yes, this can be a yawn-fest that is almost unavoidable at later stages of the game.

While these gripes are tangible ones the game can be quite fun and the strategy aspects of the game help it stand out from competitors such as GTA IV. The strategy mode lacks depth but is something that adds an interesting dimension which, again, because of gaminess, tends to be engaging for the first few hours only later to become more of a nuisance.

The strategic addition is one part of the game that they really failed to exploit, a literal treasure trove still buried, at least so far as the single player game is concerned. It is utterly absent from the multi-player side of things--a huge mistake on its own, leaving a fairly slim multiplayer that quickly runs sour and repetitive. In sum, it is something that they simply failed to tap into as completely as they should have no matter what type of game you were hoping to play.

Perhaps the one aspect of the single-player game that is most damaging is that it is too easy, particularly when you've grown and upgraded your family. Strategically speaking, the game dies after your family becomes powerful enough and you are more or less assured that no business will fall to enemy hands.

This easy-mode factor also extends to the direct game play in which taking over rival locations is your main activity. Unfortunately, there is no means (that I'm aware of) to increase the difficulty without artifically limting yourself in some fashion. A difficulty slider or setting could at least make the latter parts of the single-player game still engaging.

Multiplayer, well, it is rather astonishing that they didn't extend the mechanics and greater game world of the single player game to multiplayer. If they had, they really may have had a fantastic hit on their hands no matter what the single-player game provided. The developers opted to, in their words, "tighten up the multiplayer world", resulting in smallish game maps, overly focused game modes, an utter lack of strategy at any level, and a concentration on combat-only gaming that is done much better in any number of competing games.

They really missed their opportunity with this one and a very late attempt to add some sense of strategy, via the game-day release addition of "Don View", only managed to highlight how badly the developers and designers failed to tap into this dimension of the game.

How and why they opted to ignore this, only the brighter minds at EA can suggest. The irony is that virtually everyone I know expected and wanted the polar opposite of what was ultimately offered, so we have to imagine the designers considered it at some length on their own but decided against it even still. A crying shame, really, with virtually no chance of it being rectified going forward. Perhaps the designers will consider this mistake when they start work on Godfather III.

Having said that, in Godfather II's multiplayer we're offered a smattering of much more simplified game modes, each focused on one or another "specialty" such as safecracking or arson. Multiplayer families square off against one another in a manner reminiscent of more frantically paced games like Unreal and Quake than what many expected--a more strategically engaging multiplayer mode that could have taken advantage of both the setting and mafioso styled play that was just begging for a bit more cerebral multiplayer, punctuated by machine gun fire fights and ruthless "hits" of enemy players, of course. Games are notably brief affairs, usually no more than 20 minutes, and consist of frag-fest styled play with but minor hints at strategy or tactical incentive.

Frankly, if you were considering buying this game for the multiplayer I would suggest a serious reconsideration--and yes, this includes consideration of the release-day offering of "don mode" which really isn't much to brag about, despite EA's attempts to do just that.

In sum, Godfather II does offer a decent single-player experience that will provide many players at least a couple play throughs--some 60 to 80 or so hours in total, depending on your approach and leisure. My first play through took just over 24 hours from start to finish.

It is at least a good single player game. Not great, but good. You will feel as though another six or nine months of development, alongside a lot less short cutting and a bit more thoughtful design, could've made this a true classic that we'd all still be talking about in twenty years. Instead most players will give it a pair of cement shoes and send it to the same place as Luca Brasi.

When the price on this comes down about $15 it will be more worthy of the value, for single-player at least, and barring some post-release addition to multiplayer it shouldn't even come onto your radar if online gaming is where your inclinations rest.

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OVERVIEW

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PRO:

-- Capable setting with good (but not stellar) graphics, sound, and voice acting.

-- Interesting strategic elements normally absent from this type of game.

-- Solid plot and story telling elements.

-- Fun combat with entertaining "fatality" moves.

CON:

-- Linear single-player that eventually becomes repetitive.

-- Narrow multi-player offering that simply lacks long-term fun.

-- Obvious design shortcuts kill immersion, replayability, and overall game value.

-- Console like control scheme and feel (not a negative for everyone).

-- SP Game is quite easy with no ability to adjust difficulty.

-- Securom DRM and EA Nation multiplayer requirements.

*NOTE: Yes, this game has DRM--it utilizes Securom 7. For those who understandably have a distaste for such things, you're likely aware already and have probably avoided the game. Godfather II also requires that you connect to the EA Nation/EA Online system in order to play multiplayer--there is no LAN or private server capability, at least in the traditional sense. You can setup a so-called private (i.e., protected) game on EA Nation but you can't host or join a game that isn't in some way connected through EA itself. Ridiculous, I know, but welcome yourself to content control measures that have become a mainstay in modern gaming.

18 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars THE MOMENT THEY USED SecuROM IT IS NOT BUSINESS. IT IS PERSONAL., April 13, 2009

By 

NeuroSplicer (Freeside, in geosynchronous orbit) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

= Fun:1.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: The Godfather II (DVD-ROM)

Puzo's & Coppola's GODFATHER may be the I-Ching of western men but this installment, like Sollozzo the Turk's proposal, is an infamita.

EA's pezzonovante, they come not in respect. They come not asking to be our friends. Not once. Even though we keep financing their very existence. They only ask greedily for more.

Like Hyman Roth, EA tries once more to infect our domains with SecuROM RootKits and make us pay again and again for the same game by Limiting its installations. By claiming to fight piracy (ironic already...) EA wants to keeps squeezing its own customers. And they are ready to badmouth and brand as "pirates" anyone who might stand up to their rule.

But just like Don Fanucci, behind the white suit of an ever-menacing EULA hides nothing. Forced to accept an agreement under pain of suffering the financial loss of a worthless non-refundable product nullifies any stipulation in said agreement before any court of law. They only rule on our fear.

But we shall fear no more. Because this is cosa nostra. We have been in PC gaming long before these accountants ruined this beautiful artform.

Make them an offer they can't refuse: let THIS horses' head soil the silk sheets as EA is slumbering. Eventually they will wake up.

And they will do so screaming.

Gamers, I salut!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GF II, May 30, 2011

By 

who dat - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Godfather II (DVD-ROM)

I purchased this item with little expectation becuase the game game was bryond its prime. I was curious about it and it didn't disappoint. The graphics were solid and it was a challenging process to complete the game. The only negative is the game draws you in and makes it hard to walk away from!

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