The Godfather Xbox 360 review

Gangster games are all the rage at the moment and it only seems natural that one of the greatest gangster movies of all time should make the jump to the world of gaming. That’s what EA must have been thinking anyway, and as usual have spared no expense in signing up all the original talent from the movies and passable soundalikes for those no longer with us to make this as faithful to the movie as possible. And faithful it is, although you don’t play anyone from the film you do get to witness and interact with all the memorable scenes from the movie.

Join the Family

At the beginning of the game you get a brief opening section where you control your characters father in the last minutes of his life fighting for Don Corleone, this doesn’t take long and only has one possible outcome, your father's death. Then, you get some cut scenes showing the Don comforting the widow and promising to look after both her and her son, then cut to the wedding of the Dons daughter where the widow and the Don meet again and the Don promises to give her son, you, work.

After you’re given the chance to customize your character a little it’s into the game, and yes, you guessed it, it’s a GTA clone. The movies storyline comprises the games main missions and although they do take longer to play through than it does to watch the movie they still are completed very quickly compared to other games in the genre. There’s still plenty more to do, as is usual with this type of game, once you’ve finished the story though.

Seen It All Before

Once you get in to the game you won’t find anything too surprising here, the story missions involve all the usual things, drive to a point within a time limit, kill a certain person, set a bomb, that sort of thing. The games other activities are all also extremely familiar, carry out hits on rival mob members, do a favour for someone higher in your families hierarchy, run protection rackets, that sort of thing.

Things are a little different from its contemporaries, mainly because of the time it’s set in. Obviously there’s no mobile phones for you to get your mission updates on, instead you’ll have to use payphones, these are quite plentiful and can be heard ringing when you get near them so it’s not too much of an inconvenience.

Wireless?

Another thing missing, and always a big thing in GTA games, is a car radio. This may not seem like a big deal, but having access to music appropriate to a games setting helped immerse you in the experience. Instead what you get are a series of themes based on the movies original soundtrack, and whilst they do add to the authenticity of the game it does get a bit repetitive hearing the same tunes over and over again.

Still, the audio side of things is the better part of the games presentation, visually things don’t looks so hot. Obviously there’s been a lot of work put in scanning the actors and making an authentic period model of New York, but it looks little different from its current gen versions and the extra time EA has spent bringing the 360 version to the market has just been spent porting it across rather than optimizing it.

Pretty much every feature of a Grand Theft Auto game is here in some form or another, which would’ve been fine if EA had released the 360 version at the same time as its current gen versions. But with the recent releases of Saints Row and Just Cause in the same genre it’s up against some pretty stiff competition and to be honest the Godfather doesn’t stand up to well next to them. Whilst it’s a perfectly competent attempt at a free roaming game.

There is very little here that is more than average. On top of that there’s the glitches, it’s pretty commonplace for this type of game to have one or two here and there, but the Godfather seems to have more than its fair share. These glitches come in many forms, from getting stuck halfway through walls, non player characters mouthing at you rather than talking and being unable to carry out acts to complete missions were just a few of the problems I experienced during my time with the game.

An Offer You Can Refuse

It’s very hard to recommend the Godfather on the 360 to anyone other than die hard fans of the movie or genre. It’s not a bad game as such, it’s just that it suffers a serious problem that a lot of multi platform games do. Every single version of a game will be almost identical, and when this happens it’s the owners of the higher powered systems that suffer, and this is what’s happened here. It makes it hard to justify paying extra for a game that can be bought cheaper on another console. Still, if you like this sort of thing it is worth a rental at least as it does while away the hours if you’re not too fussy.