Sleeps with the fishes (The Godfather (Xbox 360))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	The Godfather (Xbox 360)
Date:	20/08/09 (59 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Decent free roaming strategy element, someow fun in spite of everything

Disadvantages: Old-fashioned graphics, badly executed gameplay

This game was originally released in 2006, although it feels much older. It's a strategy/shooting/driving game based on the first Godfather film. This is a really, really weird idea. The Godfather, popular thought it is, is a thematically rich and emotionally complex film about the mafia. It really isn't something that one would think of as a potential computer game. One might as well make a game out of Amadeus, or 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The game ties itself fairly closely into the film (the characters of Connie and Carlo are the most notable absentees, despite the game featuring their wedding). Your character is a minor hood who has to progress up the ranks of the Corleone crime family by helping out in various sequences from the film (for instance, just to choose the most obvious example, you will at one point have to help put a horse's head in someone's bed).

I'd imagine it's only really going to appeal to people who know the film. Frustratingly, you can't change the outcomes of things that happen in the movie (characters who die in the film will die in the game, even if you're standing nearby and could realistically have saved them).

The reason this is a bad idea is that the film is clever enough that the audience will work out that we're not actually meant to approve of the Corleones - they're the bad guys, even if their world is superficially appealing. I've no beef with games in which one gets to be a gangster and do horrid things to people. But to take a film which condemns the world of the gangster and make a clunking great mission-based game out of it in which you have to excel at the thing the film was condemning, is a bit daft. Other gangster films tried to venture into the games arena following this, with little success (did anyone actually play Scarface, Reservoir Dogs or The Sopranos?)

The gameplay is pretty basic and has some incredibly annoying flaws. At times it's a driving game, a bit like Driver and other old PS games, but really clumsily executed (you will invariably crash several times each time you drive anywhere). It's kind of nice that you have to drive all over New York (and New Jersey) to do things, but the maps aren't detailed, or particularly large, or realistic.

At other times it becomes a shooting game, as you try to take over rival Families' businesses by gunning them down. The mechanism by which you have to lock on to an enemy using one trigger and then shoot him using the other is unbelievably badly executed. You'll find yourself losing battles against absurdly small numbers of enemies simply because the game makes it impossible to kill them quickly enough. There's no sense that this is done deliberately to make the game harder, it just feels like bad design.

You also at times have to get into fist fights, the controls for which are so awful, and confusing, that I almost invariably lose them. One whole element involves having boxing matches around the city and it's just too damn difficult to bother with.

The only part that I really enjoy is the strategic side, in which you gradually increase your influence by intimidating shopkeepers, punching bakers, bribing cops, buying out whorehouses etc. This reminds me of an old PC game I used to like, Gangsters 2, and is a lot more satisfying than all the shooty, film-related stuff.

The problem is that the game is trying to be too many things at once, and consequently doesn't get any of them right. I guess it's trying to be Grand Theft Auto in period costume, but GTA (which I've not played) can't possibly be this clunky, otherwise it would never have caught on. Driving, fighting, strategy... it shouldn't be too hard to get those things right, but apart from the (unchallenging) strategy element, they're all flawed. The game is usually pretty easy, but as with most badly designed games, has occasional spikes of unheralded difficulty that leave you roaring in frustration.

It feels old-fashioned. The way you load your saved game is clunky, and annoyingly, you can't load a different game while you're playing (if, say, you accidentally shoot someone you're not meant to and want to go again from your last save point). You can only save by finding a 'safehouse' - not being able to save whenever I want always pisses me off. There are some individual arcadey 'challenges' in which you have to kill a certain number of people in a certain timescale etc, but they're unbelievably easy.

The game features lots of cutscenes, often scenes from the film. Impressively, some of the actors from the film have returned to supply extra dialogue for their characters (including James Caan and Robert Duval. Brando apparently recorded some material, but was too ill for it to come out right). Unfortunately, they don't look so good - Sonny, especially, looks like someone's taken a blow torch to a latex James Caan mask (he also always wears the same clothes, including a silk waistcoat and undone tie, even when you and he are blasting your way through a warehouse). Unfortunately, the most important actor, Al Pacino, wasn't involved. Not only does Michael Corleone not sound like he should, but they've also had to change his face.

The graphics on the whole aren't great - this was doubtless cutting-edge on older consoles, but now feels a bit past it. The flocks of pigeons taking off and landing are especially poor. Random elements of gameplay are frustratingly dumb, like the inability of your henchmen to get in cars, or the way that the very different but equally important 'shoot' and 'plant bomb' functions are performed by using the same trigger (and doing one when you mean to do the other is not good). Even in terms of plot there are some glaring weaknesses. Why don't you have a car? Why, when you've risen high up the ranks, are you still required to go and rob banks/heist trucks etc yourself instead of delegating? Why are you rewarded for blowing up safes in businesses you run? Why do you have to ask permission to get into nightclubs you own?

It uses a lot of incidental music from the film, which isn't really much good for a fast moving computer game. The snippets of conversation you overhear as you wander around are mildly amusing, but there aren't many of them really. This is another one of those games that promises you a world to explore that you'll have pretty thoroughly exhausted within a few hours.

It's kind of violent and has some swearing, but the 18 rating must be because it includes clips from the film (you earn them as rewards for finishing missions). Nice idea, but the picture quality on them is poor.

Still, for all its faults, I was interested enough to finish it. It's old-fashioned, a bit clunky in some ways and *very* clunky in others, but it is perversely enjoyable. One for the crap-but-fun pile. I wouldn't (and didn't) pay more than a fiver for it, but it kills time. But if you have to make a computer game out of one the iconic films of the last 40 years, make it better than this.

Summary: A film game that's not as good as it should be