Few and far between, these narrative portions are broken up by lengthy, repetitive stretches of playing as ‘The Don’.Įssentially, playing the role of The Don consists of expanding your portfolio of crime rackets (chop shops, drug trafficking, brothels etc) and strengthening your gang with a view to eliminating rival families. Strangely (considering the source material) the story elements seem to have been an afterthought in the design process, acting merely as a device to guide you through the game’s three locations (New York, Florida and Cuba). In fact, if you’re looking for a lesson in how to direct a cut scene so that it lacks any sort of engagement with the viewer whatsoever then there are few better places to start looking than here.

Not that these moments are presented in a particularly entertaining manner.

As Dominic you bear witness to, and play a part in, various key events from the movie the Senator Geary and dead prostitute incident, for example. You play as ‘Dominic’, a brand-new character entrusted by Michael Corleone himself to run the New York sector of his crime syndicate. The ‘game-based-on-popular-movie’ syndrome (in which said games are almost universally sub-par) rears its ugly head within minutes of starting out on your criminal adventure.

With The Godfather 2, we can expect a game that makes intelligent use of the source material while improving on the modest effort that was the first game, right? Wrong. Crime, drugs, violence, family loyalty, slicked-back hair, suave Italian suits… just a few things that spring to mind when outlining the key elements of The Godfather franchise. When it comes to creating a videogame based on an existing piece of popular entertainment there can be few examples of a series more suited to the task than The Godfather.

Godfather 2 game on pc