The revelation that Electronic Arts is working on a sequel to their well-made film-to-game adaptation of The Godfather has us worried. On the one hand, we desperately want to know more about how the more modern setting will affect the previous game’s “bleed the city dry” approach to extortion and organized crime dominance. On the other hand, we can’t help but remember Michael Corleone’s chillingly veiled threat to his wife, uttered in the first film: “Don’t ask me about my business.” Curiosity won out of course – helped along by the fact that this is, you know, a video game – as we braved the crowds to bring you this early glimpse at EA’s The Godfather II.
Click through for the goods.
There’s still not an awful lot being revealed about how The Godfather II’s story will wind in and out of the events of the film. After rescuing Michael Corleone from a deal gone bad in Havana, Cuba, your created character is appointed as the new Don. We know that Tom Hagen – voiced once again by Robert Duvall – serves as consigliere, but neither he nor Michael were seen during our demo.
The focus was instead on the day-to-day business of running a crime family. The open-world action elements from the previous game have been carried over and, in some cases, updated. The most game-changing new element is a strategic Don’s View. At any time, players can call up a 3D representation of any of the game’s three cities: New York, Miami and Havana. Each city is filled with businesses of all sorts, all of them controlled by different crime families.
Each business also serves as a front for some illegal activity, such as gun-running or drug manufacturing/distribution. In a given city, all of the businesses serving as fronts for a single illegal activity together form a crime ring. Any family who controls the entirety of a crime ring receives a bonus in the action-based portion of the game. For example, taking over a city’s gun-running operation gives your created character and his family of underlings increased ammo capacity.
Each owned property can – and should – have guards allocated to it. Each guard assigned takes a chunk out of the weekly profits, but they’re necessary for protecting your controlled businesses from takeover or sabotage attempts by rival families. Families also feud with one another, the results of which are always reflected in the Don’s View. Players can use this information to their advantage, waiting until a pitched battle over a contested business ends and then moving in to clean up the now-weakened guards and initiate a hostile takeover.
The makeup of your criminal organization is also an element which needs to be considered, since each man comes with his own set of specialties. Beneath the Don is a single underboss (who gets three skills), followed by capos (two skills) and then soldiers (one skill). Family members need to be recruited, trained and, if their usefulness comes to an end, even eliminated.
At any time, players can choose to be joined by up to three family members, putting their various skills to use in the ever-raging war against rival families. Specialties come in a variety of types; a medic, for example, will heal the group or revive you if he’s close by when your health is depleted. Others skills allow the breaking down of doors, the cutting of fences or phone lines (so backup cannot be called) and the setting of explosives.
Commanding accompanying family members seems relatively simple. For the most part, they know how to take care of themselves. Specialty-specific orders, such as cutting a hole in a fence, are entirely context-sensitive. An icon – a pair of bolt cutters in the case of fence-cutting – appears when the targeting crosshairs hover over certain areas, with one button giving the order to perform the contextual action and another to cancel the same.
Just like the Corleones, rival families have underbosses, capos and soldiers of their own. These men can be temporarily or permanently put out of commission by calling in some favors. Helping out a local District Attorney with his own problems could result in a rival family member being thrown in jail for a week, thus depriving the rival of that person’s abilities. The DA may even go as far as feeding you information on a rival’s movements, which can be used to arrange a hit. These tips are necessary, as each rival Made Man can only be executed in a certain way.
The team behind The Godfather II is taking an “ain’t broke, don’t fix” approach to the game’s development. The best features of the previous game – mainly, the extortion and empire-building mechanics – have been carried over and then improved on in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The story is still an unknown factor, but EA certainly did a good job of weaving a complementary narrative running parallel to the film for the previous game. The only downside is that there’s still a ways to go for The Godfather II; the game is currently planned for a February 2009 release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PCs.
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