RETRO – When we shed tears over a game built on a film or universe we love and that means a lot to us, there can be two reasons for it: either it absolutely nails the atmosphere, or it pathetically botches certain parts. Sadly, both are true of The Godfather… The Godfather turns 20.

I think I achieved everything in The Godfather that I truly wanted. I rose from a worthless nobody to one of New York’s most notorious gangsters, a high-ranking “soldato” in the Corleone family, spoken of in hushed, respectful tones when I walk down the street, while rival gang leaders fear me. My wealth may not yet rival the Don’s, but I can get anything I need at any time. I dealt with most of my enemies without mercy, and anyone who defied me, or once caused me pain, ended up regretting the day they were born when I finally sent them to the afterlife.

And yet here I am, sitting in my chair and brooding like Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather Part II, somehow dissatisfied and disappointed. Because Electronic Arts came nowhere near delivering on my hopes for The Godfather…

The Godfather Feeling: Checked

Still, there is nothing wrong with the atmospheric wrapping. When The Godfather loads, it gently and slowly opens with the familiar melancholy Godfather melody by Nino Rota, and that immediately got me in the mood for the game. The menu is tasteful, easy to navigate, and fits the mood of the films. In a clever marketing move, EA even slipped the DVD trailer for the trilogy into the menu options, so through those edited film clips even people who saw the movie a long time ago can revive their Godfather memories. Another great idea, and one that adds a lot to the atmosphere, is that during the game we can unlock additional scenes from the films, some of which also appear in the game itself, with minor or major alterations.

So yes, the presentation is basically fine. The only thing that shocked me a little was that in the very Spartan video settings, which offer barely any options, we can choose between exactly two resolutions: 800×600 and 1024×768… By 2006 standards (at the time of writing), that already belongs in the joke category, even if this is essentially a console port. (As later became very clear to me…)

Even so, I still threw myself hopefully into the game’s opening events.

This Means Vendetta, Mark My Words…

At the very beginning of The Godfather, we see a young, successful businessman paying his usual debt to the Godfather’s men, then meeting his loving wife so the two of them can go out somewhere together for some fun. Babysitters are watching the kid, so they seem headed for a pleasant evening, but a rival mob boss doesn’t like the man’s business success, so first he blows up his store in a bombing, then sends a few gangsters after him to beat him to death. This is where we first enter the game, so we can immediately try out its peculiar fighting system (more on that later), and after we beat everyone down with our fists, the mob boss simply has our hero shot dead.

After the man breathes his last, the boss casually flicks away his cigarette butt (as only truly evil characters can…), then throws a haughty glance at the little child who has by then run over in despair, and leaves the scene.

Before the child can suffer a complete nervous breakdown, the Godfather arrives and assures him that his time will come too someday… And of course that little boy is none other than our hero, whom we will control throughout the entire game. Clever, interactive introductory opening, no doubt about it: Electronic Arts has always known how to do this sort of thing…

Plastic Surgery for Beginner Gangsters

Time jump: our hero is now grown up, and at the beginning of his gangster career we get to decide what kind of face he will use to conquer the underworld. This is an improved version of The Sims 2 character editor, and it really is a neat idea that we can shape him into whatever we want down to the tiniest detail. Among other things, we can alter the shape of his hair, eyes, eyebrows, mouth, nose, and ears, all with such detail that we can completely redesign the fullness and shape of his upper lip, the thickness of his earlobes, the density of his eyebrows, the wrinkles on his forehead, and even its height. There are so many clever little options to tweak that I could fill the entire article just listing them all, then write a few more boxes and I’d be done, wouldn’t that be nice…

All right, the age of daydreaming is over: anyone enthusiastic enough to fiddle with this can, with enough persistence, create their own perfect likeness for the hero. Personally, when I saw the default figure the game offered me, I simply thought, wow, this guy looks damn good already, no need to change anything, then clicked OK and let the whole procedure go to hell…

He Fell in With the Wrong Crowd

After the opening section and the mysteries of plastic surgery, we can watch the game’s actual intro, which is none other than the very beginning of the first Godfather film: the wedding, when Connie Corleone, the Don’s daughter, gets married. Once again the game earned a point from me: it brilliantly recreated that scene in which Luca Brasi, the Don’s “gorilla,” practices his congratulatory speech (“…and I hope their first child be a masculine child,” sic.).

The Godfather also meets Tom, the main character’s mother, who asks the Don to help the young man get back on his feet because he has fallen in with the wrong crowd. “Getting back on his feet” is meant literally too, because after the Godfather sends Luca Brasi to take charge of educating the boy, our hero is lying on the ground while his companions, a few rotten juvenile delinquents, are kicking him while he’s down. Of course we immediately pay them back: with Brasi’s help (and the launch of a long tutorial section), we can beat them one after another.

After that, the game’s story takes further interesting turns and follows the film’s plot with surprising professionalism, without interfering too brutally, while also introducing its own properly developed strands.

For quite a long time I was genuinely satisfied with the story: it is atmospheric and fits the original film extremely well. Unfortunately, at a certain point the story slumps badly, and we also find some irritating nonsense in it: in one section, for example, Fredo, the Don’s weakling son, is blasting away at the gangsters chasing us, even though any self-respecting The Godfather fan knows perfectly well that he was never really capable of even picking up a gun…

All right, these are minor things, that is not why I scored the game below 70 percent… The first real slap in the face came when I got more familiar with the controls. In TPS mode it is barely acceptable, although even there the rather lousy camera handling exhausted me a few times. The fighting section I already mentioned is also handled pretty badly: it is needlessly overcomplicated while somehow still awkward. You can select an enemy with the right mouse button, then use various keys to punch from the right or left, slam him into a wall, kick him in the stomach, grab him by the throat, and once he is weak enough, finish him with a single move by snapping his spine or neck vertebrae.

That all sounds very exciting on paper, but unfortunately we are not talking about some kind of Mortal Kombat-style miracle. Technically the whole thing is rather pathetic, partly because of the poorly animated moves, partly because of the clumsy controls, and also because the enemy usually fights so miserably that you can beat him senseless with simple slaps, so there is no point in getting fancy.

The shooting is one degree more enjoyable, but even then The Godfather is light-years away from Max Payne-style firefights, mainly because of the stone-stupid artificial intelligence.

We can also improve our fighting and shooting techniques with experience points, but honestly I did not notice much of a difference…

Raisin Driving School Rulez

But the TPS part was never the strong point of GTA clones, so I would not even complain about that… What is simply TER-RI-BLE in the game, however, is the driving. I do not know what unfortunate clown they assigned to create the physical modelling of the cars’ behaviour and the driving model itself, but I sincerely hope I never have to encounter that person’s work in any game ever again. The cars move as if they are sliding on soap, and if they slip even a little, they immediately spin out and it is almost impossible to straighten them out again.

Before you comment on my driving skills or tell me that these are cars from older times: well, in Mafia (which really simulated the handling of old cars perfectly), the driving model was simply excellent, and I also quickly took another look at Need for Speed: Most Wanted (I still do not understand why they did not bring in developers from that team for The Godfather) and the driving there was pure delight too.

On top of that, there is another horribly annoying bug in the game: cars often react brutally late to whatever key I pressed. I had already hit the brakes, but my car was still tearing forward straight into a wall! Well, bravo, that was fine work…

No Point Sugarcoating It: This Is Ugly

When the first screenshots of The Godfather arrived back in the day, everyone’s jaw dropped in awe, but when the Photoshop veil fell from the final version, the end result was quite disheartening.

It is not even the characters I have a problem with, because the human models are genuinely well done, but everything else: the poor environments, the bleak, grey, low-resolution textures on the walls, the absurdly few and weakly executed 3D effects. I nearly fell backward in my chair when I saw, for example, that the shadow under the cars is just a flat horizontal grey slab, and beyond that I could keep listing technical solutions that feel like the first Tomb Raider.

But there is nothing to praise in the car models of The Godfather either: to begin with, there are very few types, and the ones we do get look horribly low-effort, boasting very few polygons.

Please, dear developers, this is 2006 (at the time of writing), and turning out graphical elements like this under the name of the most powerful and prolific game publisher in the world right now is painfully embarrassing. Even the graphics of the 2002-released (PS2 port) Grand Theft Auto 3 hit harder than this – human models aside, of course.

Little Theft Auto

Beyond the graphics, the mechanics of the game also leave a lot to be desired. And that is a shame, because on paper the developers lined up some genuinely good ideas about how we could build a successful gangster career. Listing all of them now would take too long, but the essence of the game is basically “respect”: the more people respect us, the higher rank we gain in the Corleone family, the more money we get, and so on. We can earn ourselves a little fortune, for example, by walking into various bars, nightclubs, and shops, roughing up the shopkeepers a bit, and then they start paying us. In theory we can also improve our persuasion skills by earning experience points, but honestly I did not see much point in that when one or two slaps make them listen anyway…

My real problem with earning money is rather that I saw absolutely no point in stockpiling much of it. There are so few things to spend it on, and we accumulate a considerable fortune so quickly, that after a while it becomes completely pointless to spend time extorting shopkeepers, because even without that we can gather more than enough cash.

Beyond the money-making, The Godfather is unfortunately also a horribly stripped-down GTA clone. There are no police, ambulance, fireman, pizza delivery or other missions, and apart from the rather poor selection of cars there are no motorcycles, boats, planes, or at least more interesting vehicles, nor any other fun possibilities of the kind we were simply drowning in with San Andreas, but which were already characteristic of GTA 3.

A Message to the Developers: Watch Out for Horses and Horse Heads!

So, as much as I had been waiting for The Godfather, it was that much of a disappointment. Never mind that it managed to capture the atmosphere of the films well, never mind that hearing Marlon Brando’s voice in the game is genuinely chilling, because technically it simply does not really hold up. It is a seemingly complex but actually rather linearly beatable, clumsily controlled, somewhat ugly game that is really saved, beyond its connection to the film, by the fact that you always want to know how the story continues. There are good ideas in it, and in places it is genuinely exciting and interesting, but then it kills your enthusiasm again when you have to get into a car and do a bit of sledding. A real shame: with this much money they could have achieved a lot more, they just should have handed development over to Rockstar…

-BadSector(2006)-

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Developer: Visceral Games

Genre: TPS, GTA-like

Release: March 21, 2006