Up close and personal

Like the first game, taking over businesses is required to succeed. Businesses tend to follow along the lines of Gun Running, Diamond Smuggling, Prostitution Rings, Gambling and the other typical mob activities. Of course, you're not the only family out to control these places and you'll usually have to fight the previous owners to get the property. Even once you have control of a place, that doesn't mean the other families will just give up, as they will often attack or just plain bomb them. Businesses provide money every day, which can be used to hire guards to protect them when you're not around.

Money can also be used to upgrade your family. Like any good mafia organization, you'll need soldiers, capos, and an underboss to help you out. These family members all come with different skills, such as lock picking (handy for opening safes), healing, demolitions and brawlers, and tend to be stronger than your average thug. Up to three family members can be in your crew at any one time, following you around. The rest can be sent to guard businesses. Family member with the demolition skill can also be sent to bomb rackets, putting them out of business for a while. This is useful as control of all the rackets in a specific venture grant bonuses. For example, controlling all of the Diamond Smuggling rings gives you, your guards and family members bulletproof vests. Family members come with different gun licenses, and can only handle certain levels of firearms, so you might need to replace family members if you wish to get better men. Money earned from rackets can be used to upgrade the skills of your character and family members. These upgrades increase the amount of time you have to be healed, gun accuracy, and health regeneration speed.

What The Godfather II brings to the table that's new is Don's View. By pressing the start button at any time, a 3D map is brought up on screen, showing the city you are located in with all the businesses. For example, if the Granado family is attacking one of your drug rackets, and you're in a different city and won't be able to make it in time. Simply open up the Don's View menu, select the business under attack, and you can send some of your made men to go fend them off. If they fail, the rival family will take over the business and any made men will be injured. You don't lose them forever, but they will be gone for several minutes. Consider this your map, and you can access everything from the map, info on other families and random collectible information.

The gameplay of The Godfather II is unique thanks to the strategy element, but eventually becomes redundant. Throughout the game missions rarely deviate from "Go to this place, shoot this guy". Missions that give you kill conditions are always based around destroying businesses, beating up or killing people, and stealing something. Difficulty is almost non existent, and even the last mission isn't particularly challenging.

Multiplayer?

The game features a multiplayer mode, but a question of depth is prevalent. You take one of your made men from the single player game and play in a variety of team-based game modes, such as team deathmatch and a mode where you attempt to crack the other team's safes. Doing tasks like finishing first on the winning team or healing 5 teammates gives you points towards upgrading your characters gun licenses. While it is a neat feature, it probably won't stand up in the long run to all the Call of Duties and Halos out there.

The verdict

The main game should take anywhere from 10 to 14 hours to complete. Outside of that, gun upgrades and safes can be found and banks to be robbed. After that, there isn't a whole lot to do. It took me about 15 hours to complete everything in the game, with over $300,000 dollars left over after upgrading every stat for every character.

The Godfather II is a definite improvement over the original. The strategy element is a welcome new addition to the standard sandbox experience, and the Godfather is great. Sadly, a host of graphical bugs and glitches and gameplay that is just too easy and repetitive keeps it from matching the standard set by Grand Theft Auto IV. Fans of The Godfather should find it interesting, and it definitely is worth a look, especially if you missed out on the first game.