Once you start your family, you’ll have to get to the mission at hand which is taking over rival families and extending your reach over the city.  You have to intimidate, kill and extort your way to the top.  You do this across New York, Florida and Cuba.  There are all types of crime rings to take advantage of as you can imagine.  Diamond smuggling, gun running, prostitution and gambling are the norm.  For those of you not aware, this game is M rated so expect some hard language and boobies throughout.

The gameplay is rather simple.  You’ll have no problems navigating the streets or causing massive amounts of murder.  Executions are back and as brutal as ever.  They’re done with a simply click of the Right stick.  Each weapon has an execution and it really never got boring.  My favorite has to be the baseball bat.  I’m surprised that I chose the bat given the number of weapons in the game but it was my favorite to use for execution.  Try it.  Trust me.  You can still aim at different parts of the body to make them limp or crawl for mercy before finishing them.  Shooting kneecaps was fun.

One of the more impressive things of the game was the Don’s View.  The Don’s View is a 3D representation of your entire empire and the things you control in the city.  It’s a link to your family, rival families, your businesses, corrupt officials you have in your back pocket and pretty much everything else.  You can plan hits on rival made men, bomb enemy rackets, send more guards to defend your rackets and upgrade your family attributes.  I loved it.  I spent a lot of time just increasing the number of guards at my strip clubs or bombing those places I didn’t control.  It’s also very useful in plotting a course of action on contract hits or compound raids.  You can usually take out a Capo, sabotage an establishment, and kill someone for money all on the same corner.

If there’s one thing to criticize the game on, it’s the repetitiveness of it all.  An example of this is doing favors throughout the city to get information on a kill condition for a made man.  Each made man in a rival gang has to be killed in a specific way (a kill condition) and you have to do favors for people in the city to get this information.  You’ll see these people scattered throughout the city with a key icon above their heads.  Talk to them and they’ll give you instructions on what to do to get the kill condition.  It was always a mixture of killing someone, beating them up or smashing/stealing property.  Most of the time, if you’ve been a good Don, you’ll already own the property you’re smashing up or stealing from so that makes it easy.

There wasn’t much variety in this at all.  It would’ve been nice to mix it up to a dozen different ways to carry out a mission but there were really only a handful of scenarios to go through.  Once you decided to do a favor, you were given the same song and dance.  Kill them, beat them up, steal something or smash up some property.  Even extorting and taking over businesses had little variety.  Each racket (or business) has an owner that you have to intimidate in order to control.  You have to find a weak spot (or not) and pressure them to give control to your family.  Push them too much thoguh and they fight back but the instances were rare.  Usually just punching a guy around got the job done or pointing a weapon in their face.

Be careful about committing crimes in view of the public.  Everyone is a potential witness and Johnny Law will definitely come running if you stay in a hot spot too long.  If there’s a witness, you’ll see a red eye above their heads.  Take them out or leave the scene.  You’ll also notice a yellow or red circle on the HUD identifying the patrolling area.  Once the yellow circle turns red, you’re deep in the shit and police are probably already shooting and hunting you down.

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