I received The Godfather: The Videogame for the original Xbox when I was a teenager and failed to complete it. Infact, I didn't really play much of it for all. I still own my original copy and Xbox, so I figured that, as an adult, I should be able to complete this game, and that the only reason I neglected it was because I was a stupid kid who didn't take the time to really learn the mechanics at all. I was mistaken. My younger self was compeltely right to ignore this game. There is so much fucking wrong with it that just making a bulleted list in a word document took me ten straight minutes, and I didn't even cover all of the problems I have encountered in the game.
To give you a general layout of the game's progression, the city of New York is divided into Little Italy, Brooklyn, Midtown, Hells Kitchen and New Jersey. There are four enemy gangs that each have annoying and difficult to remember wop names so I'm just going to refer to them by the color suits they all wear. In order of difficulty they are Brown, Green, Purple and Red, with the player's gang the Corleones wearing Black (naturally). Each gang controls a single large Compound composed of two buildings that serves as their headquarters, each one located in a different part of New York except for Little Italy where the Corleone Compound is located. The rest of the locations in the city are Businesses, Clubs, Apartments/Hotels, Warehouses and also Rackets which can be located in the other rooms of all four of the other establishments.
None of this information is uneccesary, just wait.
In order to earn money in the game, the player is more or less required to assault locations controlled by other gangs, kill all of the mafia soldiers defending the location, and then "intimidate" the owner of the business into being extorted. This seems fairly straightforward; a player can intimidate by aiming their gun at the owner, beating the owner up (sometimes just grabbing them is good enough), busting up the furniture and fixtures in the shop, and occasionally shooting other NPCs in the shop but this seems to not work so well.
Right, so the first order of business is to take out the goons guarding the store. The front entrance of a regular Business always has 2 guards at the front. If there is an alleyway nearby there will be 2 more soldiers in the alleyway. Which means the player must take on 2 enemies by themselves, often 4, plus however many enemies spawn inside the building which can be anywhere between 0 (if the Business only has one room) to 2. So you might be looking at 6 enemies. On top of this, there's very little cover on the streets, in order to get cars to stop you have to run up to them and press the hijack button, which instantly raises your police alert level before you even get into the car, and sometimes the civvie inside will speed off, or if you're particularly unlucky it won't be a civvie inside at all, but another mafia goon who will proceed to try and kick your ass.
Additionally, just drawing your weapon on the street will cause any nearby cops to draw their weapon and open fire on you. At least the mafia goons will also engage them as well. If you kill any more than one or two of these cops (who are likely shooting you in the back as you try and take out the goons) it will raise your alert level to the point where more police will begin endlessly spawning and you more or less have to abandon the mission and retreat to a safehouse. So to take out the enemies on the street you not only have to take on enemies that always outnumber you, but on top of that you need to do so quickly and discretely. Then you need to get inside the Business, and then you need successfully intimidate the owner which is sometimes easy and sometimes difficult depending on the location.
But wait, you're not done yet, because the Business might have a Racket in the back, which is denoted by the message "Back Door Unlocked!" appearing. Racket spawning appears to be random. Additionally, sometimes the message doesn't fucking pop up, so you have to manually check your map and see if the Business is still displaying the symbol of the enemy gang after you've successfully extorted it. At this point you have to go into the back room(s) of the Business which can be anywhere from just 1 to 3, each of which will mostly have 1 enemy in them, sometimes 2. Then, once you've dealt with all of the enemies, you need to approach the racketeer and buy them out, which is at least easy enough since after the first few Businesses you take over you should always have the money to do.
Complicating this is that there's a completely pointless RPG-like leveling system that controls how good you are at Fighting, Shooting, Running, and "Street Smarts" which I'll get into. But the most important thing you need to upgrade is your Health, which starts out so low that an enemy can kill you in one or two shots. Your Fighting skill also controls how quickly you intimidate shop owners and whether or not you can grapple them. So if your Fighting skill is too low, you can find your grabs being thrown off by a fat old man who sells stolen cigarettes or a fucking madame who's running a brothel just because you haven't reached some arbitrary level. Additionally, you don't gain any stats as you level, all of it must be manually upgraded with the single skill point you get per level.
You have the aim of a stormtrooper unless you upgrade your Shooting skill to maximum, and even then its still jank because there is an auto-targeting system that is more or less completely broken. It only sometimes locks on to the correct enemy, and more often that not will entirely ignore an enemy that's shooting you in the back in favor of one that's ducking behind cover and hasn't popped out yet. Supposedly you can hold the lock longer for a critical hit, but while the targeting reticule turns red I don't notice any better damage when I score a hit doing this. On top of that, it has a janky body-targeting system that is designed to be able to lock on to the head, hands and legs of the target. So you can, say, disarm an enemy by shooting the gun out of their hand. The trouble is that if an enemy is behind cover, it will always lock on to center mass and you need to adjust the targeting reticule to hit them at all if they peek out of cover. When they're fully exposed though, the game often has a habit on locking on to their shoulder where your shots do less damage and barely stun the target at all.
Yes, this game has a cover system, which the enemies are quite adept at using, even capable of firing shotguns and tommy guns from behind cover one-handed, and only popping up to allow you a sliver of a second to take a shot at their head at random intervals. If you try to flank them, the enemy always detects this and will fire on you the moment you round whatever they're using for cover, at point blank range, which most often will just straight up kill you.
As if that's not enough, all of the firearms in the game have three upgrade levels. The default upgrade level of every firearm in the game is worthless. Enemies will just straight up ignore gunfire in some cases even from the most powerful weapons, even at point-blank range, just because there's an arbitrary dice roll attached to low-level guns. Scraping up the cash to upgrade to level two guns which only sort of work is not exactly that hard, but you have to drive all over the city to find the specific vendors who will sell you the upgrade as they're scattered as far apart as possible, and visiting any of them has a random chance to spawn a 2-3 enemy ambush that tries to take you out, which means you might have to go into a protracted gunbattle just to fucking fix your shitty weapons.
However, the level three weapon upgrades, which actually make the weapons work like regular videogame weapons that actually hit what you're aiming at, are leagues ahead of the cash you make. I've taken over all of Little Italy and Brooklyn so far with big chunks of Midtown and at the current payout rate for the businesses I've extorted I'll make enough to afford the cheapest level-three upgrade in 3 paydays. Which occur about every hour and a half or so. On top of this, the only two ways to acquire ammunition to reload after a gunbattle are to either buy it from weapons vendors which are also scattered randomly around the city, or to go to one of your safehouses. You're awarded a safehouse in each part of New York at various points for completing the campaign missions, but often times you have to buy the things which will cut deeply into the cash reserves you need for upgrading your weapons. But the safehouses are more important than the upgrades at least in the short term because you need that ammunition since you have to dump tons of it in almost every firefight.
You can also only save your game at safehouses, and reloading a save requires quitting to the main menu, no quicksave/quickload and when you're on the streets of New York and not engaged in a mission there are no checkpoints. Which means if you die in a gunbatlle you respawn with your ammo having been wasted, often times some distance away from where the action was. To get back to the place you were trying to assault, you need a car, and stealing one will instantly raise your police alert level which might already be high from the previous battle. Plus, killing enemy mobsters raises your Vendetta level, which will start a Mob War once its maxed out. Early in the game, you only really need to kill 4-5 enemy soldiers to start a Mob War.
If you're engaged in a Mob War, all enemies of that family will instantly engage you at range the moment you become visible. They won't bother trying to beat the shit out of you, they'll just pull their tommyguns and shotguns and open fire on you. Which includes the random mob soldiers that might spawn out of a car you're trying to hijack, who will open fire on you immediately on stepping out of the car at point blank range, usually with a shotgun. The only two ways to end a Mob War are to bribe an FBI agent, which is expensive and requires you to drive to a very specific part of the city to do, or to bomb a Business owned by the enemy gang. Which requires assaulting the storefront the same way I detailed earlier. But if you've already made it inside the fucking store, why the fuck would you blow it up when you can just take it over, which doesn't fucking end the Mob War even if you wipe out half the gang-owned businesses in the district.
If you're killed at any point during this bullshit, you lose the Mob War and 2-3 of the Businesses you own are bombed, which means for a month of in-game time you will make no money off of them, but at least you don't need to go out and fight to retake them. Additionally, you have a strict time limit of 50 minutes, real time, to end the Mob War or your Businesses get blown up anyway. While you're in a Mob War gangs will sometimes also send cars with mafia hitmen in them to take you out. The gang members can fire a tommygun out the window of their car, but you can't return fire with anything due to how the game works. Upgrading your Street Smarts skill lowers the amount of Vendetta you accure from killing enemies, but you need those fucking upgrade points for Health, Shooting and Fighting in that order.
And I haven't even gotten into the harder locations to assault in this game. which are the Clubs and Apartments. Yes, to acquire a safehouse you most often have to take over the fucking building first. Apartments can have up to 10 rooms connected by a big winding staircase, only two of which cannot spawn any enemies when you go to take the building. This normally isn't a big deal as the owner of the establishment is always in the first room, but if there is a Racket in the building it will always be located at the top floor, which means you have to take out an additional 3-8 enemies to get up there and buy the fucking guy out. Enemies can and will ambush you from tight corners too; they're not afraid of gunfire at all, and will wait at the thresholds of doors or around corners to cheeki-breeki you with a shotgun or tommygun burst.
Clubs have a different layout composed of 3-5 rooms on the bottom floor, but sometimes with an upper floor that has a balcony overlooking the vast ballroom below. A balcony which enemies can and freely will shoot you from, sometimes up to 3 of them in this one location. To even get into the Club in the first place, you have to intimidate the bouncer, which is very easy but if he gets killed, either from stray enemy gunfire or from your godawful auto-targeting fucking up, you can't get into the Club and the doors are locked, meaning you're just fucked and you need to leave and wait for him to respawn! Intimidating the Club owner is always difficult, and you're always exposed on the ballroom floor from gunfire from the balcony overhead, and you can never be sure you've killed every enemy. If the Club has a Racket which it does perhaps 50% of the time, you need to assault the upper floors which will likely bring you up against and additional 3-6 enemies, depending on how many you managed to successfully counter-snipe from the ballroom floor.
By the way, you can't leave the premises at any time to heal or pick up more ammo, because all of the enemies will respawn and you'll have to assault the place all over again. Clubs and Apartments have a critical difference over regular Businesses though. Because they're considered higher prioirty targets, mafia guards will also spawn in alcoves across from the storefront and at every street corner surrounding the store. There are multiple Clubs and Apartments that are located inbetween two intersections, plus equipped with an alleyway, and with an alcove across from them, for a total 10 additional guards plus the two assholes guarding the entrance! And, you're extra fucked if the building also contains a Racket, as even if you conquer the business portion of the structure the guards outside will still spawn if you don't get the Racket inside. Add in the 4-7 extra guards on the upper floors and you'll sometimes have to kill 20 fucking enemies just to take over a single location. And if you die at any point in this process, you have to start over from square one an assault the area all over again, sometimes with less ammo unless you want to drive across the city to get to a different safehouse and stock up.
This is an open-world game right? Just run them over with the cars, right? Wrong, as all vehicles in this game handle like shit, and every enemy is quite adept at dodging your car when you try to plow them down. Turning is abysmal, so the moment an enemy jumps out of the way you basically have to back all the way out of the area to run them down again. On top of this, strong enemies may need to be hit by a car three fucking times to fully kill them (the first two times they'll simply be knocked down and recover after a certain period). During all of this, the enemies will be spraying your car with tommygun and shotgun fire, which since every vehicle in this game is made of old pie tins will quickly reduce it to a burning wreck in short order. When cars explode they go off with enough force to take half your health off, so you need to not just leave the car but also clear the explosion range. You can't leave a car until it comes to a complete stop though, and the animation to tediously get out of it is slow, and all the while that animation is playing you can still take fucking damage from the enemies that are busily shredding you with machinegun fire.
Warehouses are the fucking worst. To begin with, Warehouses have both streets leading to them blocked off with roadblocks made up of three parked cars. Most often there are 2 roadblocks on each side of the street with 2 guards at each of them. This makes for 8 enemies, who have the advantage for cover, you need to kill just to reach the Warehouse area itself. The Warehouse has two small sheds on either end that each have 1 guard in them, and for this game's purposes they might as well be pillboxes. Then there are two spaces behind each shed, plus a stairwell that leads to an upper balcony on each side. All four of thesel ocations can also spawn 0-1 guards each. Plus the center of the Warehouse is a maze of crates, some of which are destructible, with spawn points for enemies scattered around. Its not uncommon at all to kill a bunch of enemies and have the area be dead quiet, only for you to advance forward and suddenly be surrounded and taking machinegun fire on all sides.
Additionally, there's an interior zone with a garage door leading to it that will generally spawn about 6 enemies. If you move up one of those balconies I menitoned at the beignning you can sometimes find an unlocked door that allows you to attack all of the enemies on the Warehouse floor from up above, but this will also cause enemies from the next phase of the Warehouse to enter through that door and attack you while you're on the upper catwalk over them, meaning that once again you're stuck taking gunfire from 6-8 enemies from two different directions.
While you are under attack from so many enemies at once, you start to see some very interesting patterns devleop. The enemy AI and tactics in this game makes FEAR look like a fucking joke. I've seen mobsters pick away at my health from superior range, effectively use cover, effectively use covering fire both on the ground and above me, using said cover fire while in cover themselves, flanking tactics, covering their buddies while they flank me, doing suicide rushes because they know there's only one of me and 6 of them and even covering their buddies while said buddy is suicide rushing me.
On top of this, while the starting Brown gang is easily dispatched and mostly armed with handguns, the second Green gang is armed to the teeth with shotguns and tommyguns. They're also unimaginably tough. I've seen these guys just ignore stuns from direct hits, ignore gunfire altogether, and occasionally the most powerful weapon in the game (the magnum) just straight up does no damage at all to them, probably because it was nerfed directly by the devleopers. Enemies of course never run out of ammunition, and while your starting shotgun and tommygun are effectively worthless, the enemy weapons work great and can rip you apart even at range. A close range shotgun blast will take off most of your health, and shotgun-wielding enemies will suicide rush you, even rushing you while firing their shotgun which is something you can't interrupt unless you land an instant killing blow on them.
So after you get through the first part of the fucking Warehouse there's a second location behind it with another upper catwalk, this time exposed to the outdoors. Enemies may respawn in the first section and begin shooting at you from the ground, wihle the next wave of enemies will rush you from the other side of the catwalk or attack you from the ground on in the part of the Warehouse you haven't reached yet. The Warehouse office is through a set of double doors on the fucking ground right in the middle of the catwalk you're being shot at on and the large ground are enemies are shooting at you from, plus its only protected by a chainlink fence that the respawned enemies can shoot you through.
Once you reach these double doors there can be anywhere between 2-5 enemies inside guarding the clerk in charge of the building. These enemies will hide behind cover or around corners waiting to cheeki briki your ass the minute you step into a room, and the auto-targeting doesn't always pick up their presence right away. But you can't just burst into these rooms guns blazing either, because any one of these offices might have the fucking Warehouse clerk in it who you need ot extort to take over the building. You can't let even a stray round hit this asshole once, because you need to exploit every little sliver of health the guy has to get the intimidation meter up as high as it will go. If you kill him, you need to start all over again and wait a week of in-game time for the motherfucker to even come back alive. Getting the intimidation meter all the way up means threatning him with a gun, which you can't do while ducking or behind cover, or strangling him since fists do too much damage and there's no furniture to wreck.
Once you do finally take over the fucking place, all of the enemies don't despawn until the next time the area loads. Which means even after all of that bullshit is finally over, you can still get gunned down just trying to leave! If this happens at least you don't need to go back and conquer it all over again, but you're definitely in the middle of a Mob War from killing all of those goons and getting killed means you automaticlaly have three Businesses bombed which means you just have to fucking eat that loss and be happy that the game is letting you keep what you just fought tooth and nail to take control of.
Oh, but I haven't even told you the best part, which is how you refill your health when you take damage!
Health pickups are almost always random drops form enemies, and do not restore health instantly but instead fill the health meter with a temporary bar that regenerates very slowly. Any damage taken will instantly wipe this bar out, even if it is from a single stray shot that does almost no damage at all. Enemies can and will take advantage of this, and will suicide rush the player immediately when you pick up a health bottle with them still on the battlefield. Very rarely will a large location actually spawn a health bottle in a random area for you to pick up halfway through the action, and you will be god damn happy to see it, but you essentially have to clear the entire area out before you can safely pick it up without getting rushed. There is no other way to get your health back in the middle of a battle.
I cannot fucking believe this janky, frustrating mess was considered a AAA release and hyped to hell and back when it first came out. The city is vast, but other than the businesses and shit to conquer there's actually nothing to do outside of driving to mission locations and safehouses.
By the way, there's also a tailor's shop you can enter in the main menu. You can buy a variety of snappy duds for your character to wear, but the'yre all fairly expensive, like $10,000 for a cheap suit, and you absolutely need that money for most of the game to buy safehouses and weapon upgrades.
