Godfather 2 (XBOX 360)

Gamecow’s Price	RRP $99.95     Save $10.00 $89.95
Availability
Genre	Action Adventure
Platform	XBOX 360
Release Date	09/04/2009
Rated

Everybody has either watched the legendary Godfather movies or a least heard those immortal words by Marlon Brando.  Godfather 2 allows you to take control of a mafia family and build an empire.  You will need to have your wits about you, choose your friends and enemies carefully, and be ruthless when you need to be.  Building an mafia empire can be good wholesome fun.

Godfather 2 (XBOX 360) Product Information

On the eve of the Cuban revolution, a major mob meeting in Havana takes a bloody turn in The Godfather® II. The Don of your family is killed in Cuba, and you must take the reins and lead your battered organization and re-establish the Corleone powerbase in Queens. Success breeds opportunity, so Hyman Roth invites you to expand and support him in South Florida, setting up some key choices about your longer term allegiance. When Michael Corleone comes under investigation by a Senate Committee on Organized Crime, you're tapped to run the family and Tom Hagen moves into your organization.

Build your arsenal, command your crew, establish your crime rings, and stack your pockets with favours from those in positions of influence as you fight off attacks and strike back at your rivals. The Godfather always has a price on his head and a target on his back, but don't take it personally. After all, it's only business.

Features:
• Be the Don: The new Don's View introduces an innovative strategy component to the gangster genre. Pull the strings, organize the crime, be the Don. 
• Blackhand brutality: Act like a mobster by intimidating and extorting business owners and rival families with devastating new attacks and brutal executions.
• Family and crew: It's up to you to recruit, customize, develop, and command your mob family.
• Online Don: Establish a crime family with your friends with online multiplayer gameplay.

Godfather 2 (XBOX 360) Review

Forget Robert De Niro and the tales of a young Vito Corleone in New York – The Godfather II focuses on Michael Corleone, starting with the meeting of the families in Havana to divide up Hyman Roth's empire. Unfortunately, the business is never concluded because the Cuban Revolution forces everyone to flee the country. As Dominic, a soldier of Aldo Trapani (the protagonist of the first Godfather game who has risen to run all of the Corleone business in New York), you wind up leading Michael, Fredo and Aldo to the airport in an attempt to flee. However, as you get to the runway, Aldo is shot and killed, prompting Michael to promote you into Aldo's place. The promotion comes with a significant burden, though: you need to re-establish control of New York, then expand to Miami and eventually Cuba to strengthen your family's control. Of course, other families will stand in your way, and it's up to you to eliminate them by any means necessary to aid in your domination of the crime world.

The other issue, which is more significant, is the introduction of Tom Hagen as your consigliere, which happens around halfway through the game. While I don't have a problem with Hagen advising Dominic at all, his arrival in the middle of the story makes no sense, especially since the game constantly uses an image of Tom to provide information and hints on events going on as you make your moves against your rivals. This is compounded by the fact that Dominic acts as if he's only met Tom once or twice, even though the player has seen Tom's face dozens of times at this point. It would've made more sense to introduce Tom much earlier and have him provide this information as you start to build your empire and kill your rivals, because it just comes across as a weak and confusing plot device.

You'll also be able to use this map to track down corrupt officials that you can do tasks for in return for favours that can be called in at any time, which can result in throwing off the police when you're being chased or arresting Mafioso, making an opponent that much more vulnerable. Of course, this is a temporary measure, and if you're going to try to fully eliminate a family, you'll want to track down each individual mobster and put a hit out on them. You'll discover the info on their location by doing favours for people on the street, like demolishing businesses, beating or killing people, or cracking safes. Once you've taken every business of a rival, their entire family (minus any made men that you've "retired") will retreat to their compound which you need to raid and blow up to finally eliminate their existence once and for all.

Of course, you can also use the weapons that you acquire to execute enemies like beating them senseless with a golf club or shoving a Tommy gun in their mouth and ventilating the back of their head. Now, if you're finding that you're having trouble with a particular location or fight, you can spend cash to increase the stats of both Dominic and your crewmembers, making them more capable in battle, like healing faster or being more accurate with weapons.

For the most part, the balance of action and strategy is fun – by using the Don's View, you get a sense of the overall battle raging across the three cities that you fight for, and you do have the ability to manipulate aspects of the world solely from this view (like sending soldiers to attack rivals). Similarly, you will definitely get your hands dirty with the action focus, whether that's by robbing banks or blowing away thugs as you personally ensure that your family's territory grows.

Closing Comments
The Godfather II places an interesting spin on the second film in the acclaimed series, adding emphasis on both strategy and action elements to give you a sense of what it's like to create and control your own empire. Multiplayer also puts a creative spin on using your henchmen to gain money and even items for your soldiers. However, players of action or strategy games of any variety will blow through this title thanks to the lack of difficulty in the single player campaign, and probably will only turn to the multiplayer once they've beaten the game, since they won't need to increase their henchmen's skills. It's still fun and has almost all of the elements of a great game, but until a harder difficulty level is added (which, fingers crossed, would occur with a future download or patch), The Godfather II falls a tad bit short.

Full review IGN