Product Description
On
the eve of the Cuban revolution, a major mob meeting in Havana takes a
bloody turn. The Don of your family is killed, and you must take the
reigns and lead your battered organization. Success breeds opportunity,
so when Michael Corleone comes under investigation by a Senate Committee
on Organized Crime, the Corleone Family calls upon you to reestablish
its operation in New York and expand into a new territory -- Miami.
Build up your arsenal, build alliances, and make whatever deals you need
to as you fight off attacks and strike back at your rivals. There’ll be
a price on your head and a target on your back, but don’t take it
personally. After all, it’s only business.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales
Rank: #7002 in Video Games
- Brand: Electronic Arts
- Model:
19047
- Released on: 2009-04-07
- ESRB Rating: Mature
- Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
- Format: DVD-ROM
- Dimensions:
.25 pounds
Features
- Relive the greatest
moments from "The Godfather II" in an open-world action experience
inspired by the movie.
- Act like a mobster to command respect,
intimidating and extorting business owners and rival families with
devastating new attacks and executions.
- Recruit, develop, and
promote members of your crime family. Recruit your friends to join your
family and take them into battle online to find out who is the Don of
Dons.
- Bring up to three crew members along on jobs, including
an arsonist, demolitions expert, safecracker, and more. Command their
actions in battle and unleash their specialties on your enemies.
- Be
a true Don as you coordinate all the action using a 3D world map:
survey your turf, place defenses on businesses, analyze crime patterns,
identify new illicit racket monopolies, and choose the target of your
next attack.
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Product
Description
Inspired by the events of the classic film of the
same name, in
The Godfather II players take on the role of
Dominic Corleone, a little-known member of the Corleone crime family
tasked with rebuilding the once dominant, but now faltering mafia
empire. Set in an open-world gameplay universe full of dangers and
opportunities, players must maintain and develop the Corleone crime
family's resources using every and all means available if they hope in
the end to prevail in the ultimate challenge, to act like a mobster, but
think like a Don.
Become
Don Dominic Corleone.
View larger. |
Command
a crew of three.
View larger. |
'The
Don's View' in action.
View larger. |
Enjoy
open-world gameplay.
View larger. |
Take
your family online.
View larger. |
Story
On
the eve of the Cuban revolution, a major mob meeting in Havana takes a
bloody turn. The Don of your family is killed in Cuba, leaving it to you
to take the reigns and lead your battered organization and reestablish
the Corleone powerbase in Queens. Success breeds opportunity: after
you've proven you have the chops to run a top-tier crime organization,
Hyman Roth invites you to expand and support him in South Florida. Do
you accept his offer or do you remain loyal to the Corleones? Things get
even more complicated when Michael Corleone comes under investigation
by a Senate Committee on Organized Crime, and you're tapped to run the
Family with support from Tom Hagen. Whatever decisions you make, you
must build up your arsenal, command your crew, and establish and
maintain power... or face the consequences. Stack your pockets with
favors from those in positions of influence as you fight off attacks and
strike back at your rivals. As the Godfather there will be a price on
your head and a target on your back, but don't take it personally. After
all, it's only business.
The Don's View
Be a true
Don as you coordinate all the action using a 3D world map: survey your
turf, place defenses on businesses, analyze crime patterns, identify new
illicit rackets, and choose the target of your next attack. As the Don
of a family, there are a ton of strategic choices to make in
The
Godfather 2. Just one example are Monopolies. Monopolies are
groupings of rackets that "run" the same criminal activity. Controlling,
and defending a monopoly comes with both a monetary bonus and game perk
benefits making them key to owning the map, gaining wealth and amassing
power. Monopolies can be local to one city or span across the cities.
Larger monopolies made up of many targets, spanning multiple cities are
obviously more difficult but offer greater rewards. Other in-game
rackets include: Fronts - extortable legitimate businesses of the game
that provide payouts as well as money laundering opportunities; and
Small, Medium and Large Rackets - venues containing an illegal criminal
activity and usually disguised as legitimate businesses. These three
require various degrees of muscle to defend and keep under your control.
Key Game Features:
- Build Your Family -
Recruit, develop, and promote members of your crime family.
- Command
a Crew - Bring up to three crew members along on jobs, including an
arsonist, demolitions expert, safecracker, and more. Command their
actions in battle and unleash their specialties on your enemies.
- The
Don's View - Be a true Don as you coordinate all the action using a
3D world map: survey your turf, place defenses on businesses, analyze
crime patterns, identify new illicit racket monopolies, and choose the
target of your next attack.
- Blackhand Brutality - Act
like a mobster to command respect, intimidating and extorting business
owners and rival families with devastating new attacks and executions.
- Bring Your Family Online - Recruit your friends to join your
family and take them into battle online to find out who is the Don of
Dons.
- 'It's Only Business' - Relive the greatest moments
from The Godfather II in an open-world action experience inspired by
the movie.
Commanding Your Crew
There are six ranks
within each family, starting with the Don. As the Don you will have a
right hand man, your Consigliere Tom Hagen, who will teach you the ropes
and advise you on how to take down the other families. The rest of your
family is comprised of an Underboss, Capos, Soldiers and Associates.
These are the men who guard your interests and follow your orders
without question. Members of your family within these ranks, known as
Made Men, possess exclusive skills and specialties that can be taken
into battle. Direct them wisely and upgrade them to develop their
specialties and increase the power of your organization. But beware.
Each rival family has it’s own family tree as well. Learning how to hunt
down and permanently eliminate their Made Men will be critical to your
success.
Take Your Family Online in Multiplayer Modes
Play
The Godfather II online multiplayer modes and become the
true Don of Dons. Take your money, weapons, and crew from your
singleplayer experience online and wage mob warfare against players
around the world. Play as one of your family’s Made Men and put your
best strategies to the test as you battle for riches and honors that
transfer back and forth between your singleplayer campaign. Some
available modes include:
Fire Starter Game Mode -
Arsonist crew members attempt to destroy as much as possible in a race
to reach the scoring limit.
Safe Cracker Mode - Safe
cracker crew members attempt to find safes throughout the map. Cracking
them earns your team points and money.
Demolition Assault Mode
- Use your demolitions specialty to destroy the enemy’s three assault
points.
Team Deathmatch - The bloodiest mode and so not
for the squeamish. Team with most kills wins.
System
Requirements:
|
| Minimum Specifications: |
| OS: | Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows XP
Service Pack 2 |
| Processor: | Pentium
4 2.8GHz, AMD CPU - Athlon 64 3000+ or equivalent |
| RAM: | 2GB (Windows XP & Windows Vista) |
| Video
Card: | ATI & Intel Graphics Card, Radeon
X1600 Series or equivalent |
| Sound Card: | 100% DirectX 9.0c compliant card |
| Hard
Drive Space: | 9GB of free space |
| Other: | Internet connection required for multiplayer |
Customer Reviews
It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps
with the fishes.
This Godfather II provides an
entertaining but ultimately lacking "mobster" experience. While the
single-player campaign offers an engaging yet all too linear experience,
multi-player fails fans and hopeful gamers with a narrowly focused
combat-centric set of game modes that drops the strategic elements that
make the single player side so much more interesting.
The
single-player game contains several features that provide the best part
of the Godfather II game. Namely, the strategic and "Don view" overlay,
family management, and a somewhat open-ended game world in which the
player must exert their will on opposing AI mafia families.
While
the single player experience will likely take most gamers around 30 to
40 hours to complete, a notable degree of linearity exists that causes
the replayability to diminish quickly. This is in part due to its focus
on plot and story telling--not a bad thing on its own--but also because
of a general lack of randomness.
This lack of randomness extends
into aspects you wouldn't necessarily expect to see, including the pool
of possible family recruits and the static nature of businesses (aka
"crime rings"). This is somewhat offset by the fairly large game world
consisting of three major locales (a small New York region, a large
Florida region, and a moderately sized Cuba region), altogether offering
a fair number of overall business locations and number of recruitable
associates that will take some time to explore completely.
The
game play itself has a familiar feel that manages to feel a bit novel at
the same time. While it is fun to hear the commentary as your crew
smashes a cafe or gives the smack down to opponents, both the one-liners
and the game play strays into repetitiveness by about mid-game.
Upgrading your men and finding weapon upgrades does nothing to escape
this and the strategic side of the game also ceases to expand by this
same point. In otherwords, you'll be repeating more or less the same
activities you were at the beginning of the game without any hope of
those options and actions being expanded upon as you continue. It is
what it is, nothing more and nothing less.
Some short cuts in the
game design also manage to "whack" the sense of immersion and general
depth of the setting, cheapening the game experience alongside. That is,
some aspects have a distinct "gaminess" that is hard to overlook and,
if abused, makes the game both too easy and a lot less fun. Examples
include safehouse abuse and the ability to "shortcut" (via engineers,
bruisers, or similar path-enabling family members) your way to business
owners who must be, erm ... convinced ... that they should work for you.
This latter aspect can allow you to utterly side step defenders of the
location, convince the business owner to switch sides, and then
immediately recruit in an army of defenders of your own--taking over
some locations in literally seconds flat. Yes, this can be a yawn-fest
that is almost unavoidable at later stages of the game.
While
these gripes are tangible ones the game can be quite fun and the
strategy aspects of the game help it stand out from competitors such as
GTA IV. The strategy mode lacks depth but is something that adds an
interesting dimension which, again, because of gaminess, tends to be
engaging for the first few hours only later to become more of a
nuisance.
The strategic addition is one part of the game that
they really failed to exploit, a literal treasure trove still buried, at
least so far as the single player game is concerned. It is utterly
absent from the multi-player side of things--a huge mistake on its own,
leaving a fairly slim multiplayer that quickly runs sour and repetitive.
In sum, it is something that they simply failed to tap into as
completely as they should have no matter what type of game you were
hoping to play.
Perhaps the one aspect of the single-player game
that is most damaging is that it is too easy, particularly when you've
grown and upgraded your family. Strategically speaking, the game dies
after your family becomes powerful enough and you are more or less
assured that no business will fall to enemy hands.
This easy-mode
factor also extends to the direct game play in which taking over rival
locations is your main activity. Unfortunately, there is no means (that
I'm aware of) to increase the difficulty without artifically limting
yourself in some fashion. A difficulty slider or setting could at least
make the latter parts of the single-player game still engaging.
Multiplayer,
well, it is rather astonishing that they didn't extend the mechanics
and greater game world of the single player game to multiplayer. If they
had, they really may have had a fantastic hit on their hands no matter
what the single-player game provided. The developers opted to, in their
words, "tighten up the multiplayer world", resulting in smallish game
maps, overly focused game modes, an utter lack of strategy at any level,
and a concentration on combat-only gaming that is done much better in
any number of competing games.
They really missed their
opportunity with this one and a very late attempt to add some sense of
strategy, via the game-day release addition of "Don View", only managed
to highlight how badly the developers and designers failed to tap into
this dimension of the game.
How and why they opted to ignore
this, only the brighter minds at EA can suggest. The irony is that
virtually everyone I know expected and wanted the polar opposite of what
was ultimately offered, so we have to imagine the designers considered
it at some length on their own but decided against it even still. A
crying shame, really, with virtually no chance of it being rectified
going forward. Perhaps the designers will consider this mistake when
they start work on Godfather III.
Having said that, in Godfather
II's multiplayer we're offered a smattering of much more simplified game
modes, each focused on one or another "specialty" such as safecracking
or arson. Multiplayer families square off against one another in a
manner reminiscent of more frantically paced games like Unreal and Quake
than what many expected--a more strategically engaging multiplayer mode
that could have taken advantage of both the setting and mafioso styled
play that was just begging for a bit more cerebral multiplayer,
punctuated by machine gun fire fights and ruthless "hits" of enemy
players, of course. Games are notably brief affairs, usually no more
than 20 minutes, and consist of frag-fest styled play with but minor
hints at strategy or tactical incentive.
Frankly, if you were
considering buying this game for the multiplayer I would suggest a
serious reconsideration--and yes, this includes consideration of the
release-day offering of "don mode" which really isn't much to brag
about, despite EA's attempts to do just that.
In sum, Godfather
II does offer a decent single-player experience that will provide many
players at least a couple play throughs--some 60 to 80 or so hours in
total, depending on your approach and leisure. My first play through
took just over 24 hours from start to finish.
It is at least a
good single player game. Not great, but good. You will feel as though
another six or nine months of development, alongside a lot less short
cutting and a bit more thoughtful design, could've made this a true
classic that we'd all still be talking about in twenty years. Instead
most players will give it a pair of cement shoes and send it to the same
place as Luca Brasi.
When the price on this comes down about $15
it will be more worthy of the value, for single-player at least, and
barring some post-release addition to multiplayer it shouldn't even come
onto your radar if online gaming is where your inclinations rest.
===============
OVERVIEW
===============
PRO:
--
Capable setting with good (but not stellar) graphics, sound, and voice
acting.
-- Interesting strategic elements normally absent from this
type of game.
-- Solid plot and story telling elements.
-- Fun
combat with entertaining "fatality" moves.
CON:
-- Linear
single-player that eventually becomes repetitive.
-- Narrow
multi-player offering that simply lacks long-term fun.
-- Obvious
design shortcuts kill immersion, replayability, and overall game value.
--
Console like control scheme and feel (not a negative for everyone).
--
SP Game is quite easy with no ability to adjust difficulty.
--
Securom DRM and EA Nation multiplayer requirements.
*NOTE: Yes,
this game has DRM--it utilizes Securom 7. For those who understandably
have a distaste for such things, you're likely aware already and have
probably avoided the game. Godfather II also requires that you connect
to the EA Nation/EA Online system in order to play multiplayer--there is
no LAN or private server capability, at least in the traditional sense.
You can setup a so-called private (i.e., protected) game on EA Nation
but you can't host or join a game that isn't in some way connected
through EA itself. Ridiculous, I know, but welcome yourself to content
control measures that have become a mainstay in modern gaming.
THE MOMENT THEY USED SecuROM IT IS NOT BUSINESS. IT
IS PERSONAL.
Puzo's & Coppola's
GODFATHER may be the I-Ching of western men but this installment, like
Sollozzo the Turk's proposal, is an infamita.
EA's pezzonovante,
they come not in respect. They come not asking to be our friends. Not
once. Even though we keep financing their very existence. They only ask
greedily for more.
Like Hyman Roth, EA tries once more to infect
our domains with SecuROM RootKits and make us pay again and again for
the same game by Limiting its installations. By claiming to fight piracy
(ironic already...) EA wants to keeps squeezing its own customers. And
they are ready to badmouth and brand as "pirates" anyone who might stand
up to their rule.
But just like Don Fanucci, behind the white
suit of an ever-menacing EULA hides nothing. Forced to accept an
agreement under pain of suffering the financial loss of a worthless
non-refundable product nullifies any stipulation in said agreement
before any court of law. They only rule on our fear.
But we shall
fear no more. Because this is cosa nostra. We have been in PC gaming
long before these accountants ruined this beautiful artform.
Make
them an offer they can't refuse: let THIS horses' head soil the silk
sheets as EA is slumbering. Eventually they will wake up.
And they
will do so screaming.
Gamers, I salut!
Beware! SecuROM DRM.
Limited installations, online
activations, and rootkits. That the gist of the "bonuses" you get with
this game not mentioned in the product box.
It's a shame that EA
decided to release this game as a rental.
Think before shelling
out your hard earned $50. You have been warned!
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