Godfather II (The Game)

[Samoan-Z]

Published by: Electronic Arts

The Godfather II game goes beyond the film's story by setting players in the world of organized crime in 1960’s Florida, Cuba and New York.
After being promoted by Michael Corleone to Don of New York, players expand to new cities, as they build up their families through extorting businesses, monopolizing illegal crime rings and defeating new families in an effort to become the most powerful mob family in America. To help players manage their empire, The Godfather II introduces "The Don's View" -- an innovative strategy meta-game that allows players to oversee the entire world as they grow the family business. Using the Don's View, players will be able to build, defend and expand their crime rings, while keeping an eye on the movements and plans of the rival families. Players will also learn to master the business of organized crime by building a family of Made Men, hiring crew, handing out orders, and promoting their best men up the ranks.


General Features

• Set in a stunning open-world environment, The Godfather II expands on the popular gameplay mechanics of the first game and doubles down on the series’ signature BlackHand control scheme, which now features even more visceral hand-to-hand brutality at your fingertips, introducing a new combo system, pressure tactics and executions.
• In The Godfather II, players will fight alongside their hand-picked crew, who have their own skills and expertise. Each family member specializes in a specific field such as demolitions, arson, engineering, first-aid and more.
• "The Don's View" allows players to oversee the entire world as they grow the family business.

The Godfather II
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: Xbox 360
Release Date: June 30, 2009
Release Region: United States

The Godfather II
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: Xbox 360
Release Date: June 30, 2009
Release Region: United Kingdom


The Godfather II
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: Xbox 360
Release Date: June 30, 2009
Release Region: Australia

Now that is wtf I am talking about, GTA lost touch of this amount of criminal underworld customization.

 

[Samoan-Z]

January 20, 2009 - When it comes to improving your family, you're only as successful as the men that you have under your command. Some guys continually perform their duties to the best of their abilities, making them invaluable to your empire. Others don't always pull their weight, which can be a liability, especially when you're embroiled in a long mob war with a rival family or two. In The Godfather II, the upcoming action game from Electronic Arts, your soldiers are just a small part of what you'll need to focus on to successfully eliminate your enemies. Previously, I've covered facets of expanding your empire and multiplayer with your henchmen, but there's plenty more to discuss when it comes to your underlings.

First of all, your made guys are much more than utility men whose various specializations are required to help you take over businesses (although that definitely helps when the bullets start flying). The effectiveness of each of these guys in battle is determined by a couple of key factors. The first one is that of weapons and their licenses. When you bring a man into your family, he comes with a license that allows him to wield any weapon of that class or lower. So if you happen to have a man that has an advanced license, he can carry weapons of that class and basic firearms. While you can improve their licenses by performing well in multiplayer combat, you can only improve their weaponry by having Dominic track down the hidden weapons scattered across the map in the single-player campaign. Once you've found one, you can purchase it for your henchmen so they can protect themselves.

Want to take over the world? You'll need soldiers.
The second qualification is based on the kinds of improvements that you've made to the henchmen themselves. Every single dollar that you collect in the game, whether that be from the businesses you've taken over, the money you collect from the bodies of people you kill or even grabbing bucks from craps games on the street can be used to improve a variety of stats. This includes the speed it takes to ready a weapon, a soldier's overall health and even his chance of surviving a fatal attack. Since you can augment these stats at any time (provided that you have enough cash on hand to do so), it's frequently worth it to boost your characters to ensure they are strong enough to make it through a fight.

The third factor is the level of the particular henchmen within your organization. Made men are significantly stronger than common guards and thugs that you can employ to protect your businesses. The same is true when your henchmen go up against rival families. A made man is easily as strong as a handful of guards, but the higher up in your organization they go, the more men that one person can handle. In fact, when you gain an underboss, they are as strong as 20 guards at one location, and can easily eliminate that number of guards before they start having trouble. This entire setup helps you evaluate just how strong or weak a position is, because if you decide to attack a location and notice that it's being guarded by one or more mafia gunmen, you might re-evaluate your tactics before you go in guns blazing.

This is what happens when you cross the Don.

This is particularly important because if you wind up making a bad decision or leaving one of your Mafioso in a location where they're overmatched or outnumbered, they'll be incapacitated for quite a while, which will significantly decrease the options available to you to expand your operations or attack your opponents. This means that you might not be able to send a demo expert to bomb a business and weaken a rival family's monopoly on a racket, but it can also wind up eliminating options until your crewmembers get better. For instance, players will be able to assault various banks and credit unions, trying to collect on a big score. These operate much like any other racket, meaning that players can attempt to cut the power to reduce alarms being sent to the police, use bombs to blow up walls into the safe, and safecrackers to open the bank vault. Once you've made one of these heists, you need to quickly get away from the police and over to one of your safehouses that are scattered throughout the city. Here, you can launder money, rearm yourself and escape the attention of pursing cop cars and swat vans.

Of course, what do you do if you find that one of your henchmen just doesn't seem to be pulling his weight like the other people in your crew? It might seem difficult to kick a made man out of your family once they've been established or even promoted. However, it's actually simple, because you can simply mark them for death, which means that a number of their protective elements are stripped away. Medics in your crew won't run over and heal them, the immunity from friendly fire is taken away, and you can specifically run over and execute them yourself. Don't worry, there are always plenty of thugs that hang out at your establishments or are scattered around the city that will take the fallen man's place. This is an easy way to gain newer and sometimes stronger crew members without having to invest a large amount of capital in their skills. It may seem cruel, but that's just the nature of the business.

More info from game reveiwers.

 

[Samoan-Z]

Some pics from dons view, and on the first pic shows abilty to send over goon squads and hit squads.

 

[FuManChu]

Looks alright...But i reckon Mafia II will be the better game. From what ive read and seen, its the most advanced game in this genre.

 

[Samoan-Z]

Well yea to play as an advancing solider in the mafia i'd go with MAfia 2 but this game offers to you the ability to be the boss and run a gang on your terms want to expand your turf to the hospital ... go for it send a crew to move out the current gang.

I can see this offering unending gameplay like Oblivion.

 

[FuManChu]

MAFIA 2 features:

The player can read newspapers to learn about recent news between 1945 and the early 1950s. The game features a completely open-ended map of 10 square miles, including surrounding countryside. No restrictions are included from the start of the game.

Laws, including traffic laws, must be obeyed, but the police interaction will be toned down compared to the original Mafia game.

Things such as sink faucets/taps, switches, bottles, and chairs will all be interactive, as well as radios that the player can turn on to hear a few licensed period tunes.

Cars can suffer panel damage, get dirty and explode. Dirty cars can be washed at a car wash. Cars can also run out of fuel, making refilling at one of the many gas stations of Empire City a necessity.

NPCs will smoke, read newspapers, and wait for buses, while homeless people will search through garbage bins.

Interacting with objects in the environment involves two action buttons- a standard action and a "violent" action, used in context-sensitive situations. A map will be included as in the original Mafia game.

Car trunks can be opened, and weapons and bodies may be stashed there. Car hoods can also be opened to tamper with the vehicle by doing things like disabling brakes etc.

The player will have their own car, the registration plate of which can be customised.


It has been made clear by 2K Czech that, as in the first Mafia, the cutscenes are done in the game world and in real time, rather than pre-rendered cutscenes

Its endless amounts of realism.
Ive never heard of game that offers so much...except for Saints Row 2 and San Andreas.
There are certain games that feature one or two of the above, but i think M2 is the first game to bring it all together.

 

[Samoan-Z]

^^ I gotta say dude that all sounds awesome.