The Godfather II

Can the Mob out-gun the mob? EA Redwood's second crack at being the Don of open-world action stops by for our blessing.

	Version 360 (PS3, PC)	Developer EA Redwood Shores	Publisher EA	Genre Action

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So where does that introductory "could have" become an "isn't"? Try the combat for starters. It's not bad, but it labours under the familiar spectre of a recharging health bar and resultant trouser-pressed difficulty curve. The auto-lock is extremely generous, and while you can tweak your aim for head and limb shots it's just not all that necessary. Nor is the bare-bones cover system. Epic Games may have given this particular design bandwagon another push last Christmas, but the sooner relatively cash, time or ambition-strapped developers stop trying to jump on-board the better.

Abuzz with permutations as the idea of infiltrating a business may sound, it's never explored in much depth. Building layouts are simplistic, tactical foreplay rarely amounts to more than blowing up a wall or taking out the lights before pulling a Rambo, and the fact that you can summon Made Men to your side instantaneously from HQ robs the team-building aspect of any consequence. Still, territorial warfare is a lot more entertaining than completing one of the side missions, available in ludicrous quantities from members of the so-called innocent civilian population. Pretty much every other schmuck you pass has some sob story about an unfaithful spouse or bullying corporate competitor, and the desired response is always to drive somewhere and break something or someone.

In a neat twist, you can level up your Made Men's weapon licenses in the 16-player online modes, giving them access to bigger barrels in the campaign. There's extra pocket money to be earned here too. While this seems an interesting way of tying together the off and online components, so often left to float free of one another, in the end it's just there to prop up four throwaway slabs of team deathmatch, three with skill-specific victory conditions. In Demolitions Assault the idea is to blow up the other team's base with a Demolitions expert, in Safecracker you're out to liberate their dough, and in Firestarter it's a race to incinerate some gas tanks.

Once you're past the excellent create-a-gangsta face editor (I concocted a fascinatingly ugly chap with a builder's physique, gaunt cheeks, protruding goateed jaw and hooked nose) the visuals struggle to impress. Godfather II's technical shortcomings - flat lightning, middling texture resolution and cardboard cut-out geometry - might be easier to overlook were it not for the curiously lifeless colour palette, a double disappointment after the stylised red-on-white intro. It's like watching the original films through a thick veil of cigar smoke. By contrast, the writing and audio are stone cold brilliant, with enough lines of dialogue to floor David Cage and A-grade actors to give them flesh. We can even forgive Michael Corleone's voicebox for not being Al Pacino. Just about.

We can't forgive the game it's many glitches, though. At one point I drove up on the curb to make a violent entry to a rival business's car-park, only for the vehicle to lodge for a few seconds and disappear, leaving me blinking on the pavement but beaming my crew back to our compound. On another occasion, a civilian car played a similar trick after jamming itself into a stairwell: the game interpreted this as an automotive accident, and sent a couple of cops to beat me up. Both motorists and pedestrians have a nasty if seldom lethal habit of materialising out of thin air. All things considered, whoever did QA on this game should be dipped in concrete and buried beneath John Riccitiello's swimming pool.

Once more, then, The Godfather II could have been great but isn't. There are all the ingredients here for a deliciously callous, calculating reinterpretation of the open-world city genre, a cool-headed management-action hybrid to counterbalance the petty thievery, car-jacking and cop-baiting which goes on elsewhere. But thanks to dull firefights, shoddy production values and a reluctance to expand on some genuinely intriguing ideas, the trophy stays well out of reach.

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