Developer: EA Redwood Shores
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Rating Guide: How I Review Games

Audio Recap:
 

Review:

Here I am in Cuba with a bunch of my family members and friends.  We’re having a party celebrating a bunch of recent successes and all hell breaks loose.  Bullets are zipping by, things are exploding everywhere and to top it off members of my family are being killed.  Fight or flight is probably what comes to mind in your average person’s thought process.  But not me.  I’m not average.  I’m a Don and fighting is my only option.  I must break those who sought to break me and my family.  My business is murder, extortion, money and power.  So I grab my pistol, make sure it’s loaded and take aim.  One shot, one kill.

Welcome to the review of EA’s The Godfather II.

Gameplay, Graphics and Sound

I had a lot of fun with The Godfather II.  The one thing about this game that makes it so much more enjoyable for me than your typical sandbox game is the story.  It’s so much easier for me to dive right into the characters because I know the film and its history.  I know the Corleone family.  I know Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and James Caan.  It was  easy for me to get lost in my character in the game because I wanted to be a Don.  The Godfather II spins a very intricate web of originality with its story that definitely satisfied my thirst of film consistency and respect coupled with video game fun.  It was a hell of a lot of fun playing Dominic, becoming a Don and starting my own crime family.

You start the game out on a mission for revenge; the ultimate payback.  Someone very close to you was gunned down in a Cuban airport.  It’s time to may them pay.  And pay they will at the hands of your own family.  The Godfather II allows you to build your own family.  You build your family from the ground up starting with Soldiers.  Keep an eye out on your best Soldiers because those are the ones you’ll want to promote the best within your family.  Promoting involves taking a Soldier amd making them a Capo or Underboss. 

Each of your Soldiers carries a set of unique skills.  This allows you to loosely play the game the way you want to play it.  It doesn’t allow you to completely control the way you play but you can create your own strategy with different sets of Soldier types.  There are Arsonists, Demolitions experts, Medics, Bruisers, Safecrackers and engineers to choose from.  You don’t have to worry much about which specialty you initially decide on because as you progress through the game, you’ll have an option to double or triple up on the specialities.  Using the promotion system in the game, you can promote a soldier to a Capo and give him an additional specialty so he could be an Arsonist and a Bruiser.

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