Just started this as I wanted to knock it out. Initial thoughts.

It's ugly. Shape wise, everything is as it should be, but texture wise everything is super dull, and mottled, with this weird grainy look to it. Maxed out, AA, AF, everything, and the textures just look like shit.


Controls, aiming is a bit off, but it's passable and usable. I feel the enemies have laser precision aim, but I can snap off quick headshots so no big deal. Driving controls are shit, the cars handle like garbage, but it seems like they can take a great deal of damage before they blow up.

The soldiers you have to recruit so far appear to be useless. I wind up killing 95% of everything while they're spray and pray and dieing by running up to guys with shotguns. When they die it's 10 minutes before they revive which I could see being a pain in the ass later on.

The map is a royal pain in the ass. They call it Don view, and you're supposed to use it to play this kind of RTS game where you deploy your soldiers to different places to do this or this, but so far I've just done it all myself with my soldiers in tow behind me. With many icons being laid overtop of themselves I'll often go to one building and click just to have to scroll through a popup window to select which icon I want detail on. The user interface itself for Don view is probably the most cluttered pain in the ass thing I've seen in awhile. I did send my goons to go save a shop when it got attacked when I was busy assaulting the incinerator shop, and they did alright against a few dudes while I took down the entire warehouse full of dudes.

Extorting shops. I loved this in the first one, and played it several times just to mess with the shopkeepers. So far I've encountered like 6 shops/front businesses to extort, in a much shrunk down NY map. It's so small it boggles my mind that they try to pass this off as anything more then 3 city blocks. On the minimap the enemy boss compound is like right next to the Corleone compound. He's the worst threat? Really? Point your gun outside your bathroom window Don Corleone and shoot the guy from your shitter, cause on the map, he's like right.there.

Side missions can be gotten from seemingly 6 out of 10 folks on the street, and as a Don you are evidently okay with just walking up to random strangers and asking if they've got anyone they need whacked. They also send you to bomb or break up shops. You wind up constantly fucking up your own stuff to do these little side missions. I've been sent to bomb my whorehouse, and break up my own appliance shop like 10 times by now. These people are paying me protection money, but I'll be damned if I'm protecting them.

I'm going to other cities soon I think, maybe the game will pick up then. Right now I'd give it a 50%. Hope to see many many more shops, better and bigger maps. The first city feels unfinished and very empty.

 

Florida was a nice change, the city's much bigger then the opening level. I see what Xiph was talking about now, max guard because constantly being attacked is fucking annoying. Sadly my soldiers on their own + guards seem to not be worth a piss, so that's getting old fast. Maybe once I upgrade them more they'll survive.

I don't quite understand how gangs that I had to go to Florida to hit suddenly are attacking me in NY, that's a bit annoying.

 

If you level up your dudes alongside you (brotip: there's around ten guys that are found chillin' out in the cities instead of at the bases that have two skills instead of one at Soldier level - just enough to fill your entire roster with them and have one or two left over), equip them with Tommy guns and give them Medic and spread the rest of the skills around the various utilities (safecracking, explosives, etc) then they're very useful. At end game I was running around with my three highest-level dudes with me and the rest were enough to see off two attacks at once with a little luck.

 

I haven't seen one that has multiple skills yet except for the dude I promoted to Capo, but I did just find one guy who had expert weapons skill instead of the basic license. How do I get rid of the guys I have now?

 

You can 'mark them for death' or something along those lines in the family tree screen. If you do that, friendly fire gets turned on for them and if they die, they're dead for good.

As for the multiskill dudes ('lone wolf' seems to be the term for them) there's a list of locations here. It's been too long since I last played to judge how accurate it is, though.

And yeah, the weapon skills are another variable, but the lone wolves have at least advanced. Expert is as high as you realistically need - Master is for level four weapons, which are all DLC, if memory serves. I ended up keeping the advanced weapon license lone wolves as Soldiers and promoting the Experts and Masters to the higher ranks. Took a bit of mucking about to do so, but it's possible.

 

I still really hate how they rigged the mouse into these games. Throwing someone almost never works, didn't in the first game either. Both buttons to grab, hold them down, pull it back to threaten, pull it forward to headbutt, or swing it around and let go, hoping you throw the guy instead of just lightly shove him.

I had a lot of fun in the first game throwing people down stairs and in front of cars once I got used to it, this game seems to be a bit more bitchy about what it takes as a throw motion. Figured out that I could change their weapons, and moving folks from the pistol to the lvl 2 magnum is almost game breaking. Once their accuracy gets maxed out I can't see folks standing up to them, 3 of them is enough to hold down most places, 4 can take over places on their own. As is I stopped bringing anyone but my electrician along with me once I unlocked the magnum and bulletproof vests, because I just snap off upper body/headshots while walking around and clear out the room. The only challenge at that point is switching to the shotgun when I run out of ammo, and keeping the idiot behind me from jumping between me and the targets. Hoping I haven't hit the peak of what the game considers challenge already.

Something I really hated they changed from the first game: The shops. In the first game almost every single shop was realistic. A butcher's shop, the owner was either at the counter, or he'd run from you and wind up in the basement or in the backroom. Now, he's going to wind up on the roof, or some other place that makes no sense. It's like they added extra space to make you fight through in many locations just to make it take longer. The construction sites royally piss me off for this. You can SEE the stairs you need to go to, but you're going to go all the way to the other side, work your way through a maze of concrete barriers and mixing trucks, wind your way around the multiple levels of stairs, and then finally find the guy, and then take the long way walking back out. Even though you could just vault over the barrier and go directly there, but you can't despite the barrier being lower then most windows you can vault through. Very frustrating.

The strongholds I don't mind being like this, they're supposed to take a while to knock out, but when you have to constantly be dicking around with places like the construction site, it gets really, really old, really, really fast. The first guy or two I spend the time tracking down all the key kill tip npcs, until I realized I didn't have to, once I took over all the shops, the compound unlocked for me to assault. Seems like a large part of the game you're able to just skip unless I missed something. Don't really like random people in the street telling me if I want Jimmy the Snitch to stay dead, I have to finish him off by throwing a glass bottle at him as the killing blow, that really doesnt make any sense at all.

Another thing I can't believe is the tits. Really? They seemingly put tits everywhere they could have them hanging out, and laughably, the texture for the women and the nipple/tit area seem to be higher quality then anything else in the game so far, except for the explosions of compounds. Great jump skimping on non-repetitive as fuck gameplay , and going with the higher res nipples.

I'd like if the character's had upgrades done differently, instead of the exact same upgrade paths, and I haven't noticed if their personalities come into play yet. With the random appearence generator too, I've noticed most of them look pretty much the same, so I just changed their clothes to outlandish attire so I can tell who they are with a fleeting glance. Doesn't really matter, but it's something that bugs me. If I can pretty much make myself in the game, all the npc's shouldn't look the same.

 

The game that did extraneous tits best of all was The Saboteur. There's no competition.

And yeah, the labyrinthine takeovers are a pain in the arse, but that's just a lazy way of dealing with the frankly obscene amount of goons that can be stuffed in some of them - upwards of thirty in some of them. They should have just made big, non-linear job sites so that if someone hits it, all the goons get pulled in from the nooks and crannies, but it's still a relatively short walk between the entrance and the manager/owner/whatever.

And don't worry, the difficulty ramps up another notch once you hit Cuba.

 

Yeah I've started gathering them.

I'm really, really annoyed that they just flat out ripped off the Senator waking in bed with the dead prostitute from the movie, despite the location being in NY, instead of in Nevada. Given that the voice acting was pretty bad for that part, even worse then the other low standards the game has set so far, and so quick and rushed through, the whole thing was just stupid.

Already starting to get very bored and the tedium is getting pretty high. I spent a good deal of time on the Florida airport part, killing all those waves of guys to get the union strike to stop was pretty aggravating. This isn't tower defense, I can't stand having to fight wave after wave of guys coming out of a guardshack like it's a damned clown car.

 

I really, really like the 3d minimap. It's way more functional then the lego like block maps most games use, and I can't ever see myself liking a minimap again. Same thing for Don view. The map's icon are a clusterfuck of fail, but the 3d scale map that includes almost everything is how it should be done.

I really despise the immersion breaking with The Godfather movie posters all over this one area, and in the cutscene right before you go to war with Mangano. I also really hate again the laziness of them ripping off from the Godfather 2 movie so badly again, with the gunning down attempt of Fredo and Dominic now in Florida, instead of Michael in Nevada. Fredo manipluates Dom? Not believable. The only thing he did in the movie was tell them when Michael would be home, without knowing what was going to happen. Fredo in the game seems to be helping Roth try to take over the family, and folks don't question him? In the game world itself, it's determined he's a useless little shit, so why the hell do we suddenly have to start a war with a powerful sicilian mob family, because he says he thinks it's them? Made no sense.

Now they retook half my stuff in an instant, stuff that took a good while to get in the first place. Not happy.

Edit 3: So I'm going to Cuba to assassinate Castro for the CIA. gee,, that's one of The Godfather Returns' subplots. If the author of the two sequel books to the original Godfather can weave in and out of the movie timelines effortlessly, I don't understand why the video games insist on changing locations, people involved, and lines so often.

Edit 4: Cuba is harder, there's more people per building seemingly, you have to blow stuff up or break it down to get in, and the damned soldier/army guys are fucking trigger happy as hell.

 

Reinstalled 7 today in a rage that something wasn't working right, turns out on of my RAM sticks had died on me. Lost my save games, so screw it. I'd rate it a solid 65%

 

Is that like normal 65%, meaning slightly above average, or game review 65%, meaning this is the worst piece of shit since Daikatana?

 

I'd say average. It had a ton of potential but I just didn't care too much about it. The way they took movie quotes and reassigned them to different people as well as flat out moving entire parts of the movie to different places really pissed me off. The controls weren't horrible, but I felt like my dude was moving around with a weight vest on or something. That being said throwing people around is still broken on the pc, it's a pain in the ass to get the game to tell if you're choking/threatening/headbutting, or trying to throw the dude off the ledge.

A good modding community could of redid this game, but I didn't really see if they had one. The extortion missions in the first game were incredible, the second one though it seemed like they purposefully made them be a pain in the ass by adding in forced linear paths, and long circling ones at that. I didn't notice a ramp in difficulty other then more people shooting at you at once, so that kinda miffed me too. The magnum and running headshots took out anyone easily enough to where I stopped bringing my crew with me and left them to taking over stores.

The police were a joke and not a threat, except for when you tried to rob banks and the world came down on you. I also didn't like that they'd attack you for stuff you didn't do. I was at one of the compounds in Florida, and I got shot at. A cop was near me and suddenly starts lighting me up, despite me not having a weapon out, not having done anything but walk by.

65%, playable, could of been way better. Will not reinstall to replay or even finish if I was able to save my games.