I’ll start this one off by saying that I was a huge fan of the original Godfather game. There was plenty to do, lots of variety—some driving, some killing, some strangling, some blowing stuff up and of course the sheer joy of watching the Corleone family crest occupy steadily more of the map.  I loved cruising Brooklyn and Hell’s Kitchen and Midtown and all those other great landmarks.  I came to know that I COULD take Broadway to get back to Corleone turf, and I even began to wonder if, thanks to this game, I might be so lost the next time I hit New York.  Sure, that’s probably a fool’s conclusion, but it’s potentially valid.

So why was I vaguely disappointed by the sequel?  Let’s take a look.

You kick things off down in Cuba as Dominic, the underboss to Aldo Trapani, the character you played in the previous Godfather.  Things are good, and times in Cuba could not look better—until the president is overthrown and Communism rears its ugly head.  This is, after all, 1958, and we’re in the midst of a cold war.  With Cuba no longer an option, the various crime families turn their attention back to New York, and that’s where you come in.  You’ll be out to muscle out the other crime families and make the various business safe for a Corleone to run, and you’ll do just that in New York, Florida, and eventually back down to Cuba to try and recover a stake in the once lost empire.

Don’t get me wrong here—I liked Godfather II.  There was a whole lot to like about it, what with the various things to do and all.  I could do pretty much everything I could do in the original Godfather and more.  In fact, the biggest new addition is an element of strategy called The Don’s View, a sort of map by which you can determine your next move constantly.  You’ll assign guards to take and hold fronts, and those guards cost—it comes out of your budget.  But each front you take and hold has various modifiers; bulletproof vests, cost adjustments to hiring guards, expanded clip sizes for your guns, so on and so forth.  Plus you can use it like a map, setting waypoints to guide you more easily to your next assault, or helping you find the business that’s under attack by a rival mob family.

So with so much more substance than the original, why am I disappointed?  Well, first off, I’m not terribly happy about the driving physics.  These cars felt like they were wallowing when I drove them—not so the first Godfather game, which offered me very smooth rides in the nicest cars, and even the midrange sedans weren’t that balky.  I also resent being forced to have a crew along—there are actually some buildings you won’t be able to get into, some missions you can’t accomplish, without having a crew member with a certain specialty in tow.  You can’t even break into a safe without a safecracker any more—used to be, one stick of TNT would do the job.  Now, no burglar, no payday.

I am a little disappointed by some of the new additions—it makes the game just a bit more cumbersome than it needs to be—but still, there’s plenty to do, and plenty of action, and all of it so much like the original that it’s not that bad.  There’s a lot to like here, and I definitely had a good time—you should too.