PSP - The Godfather Reviewed

Speak to almost any bloke and they will be able to give you numerous quotes from the Godfather trilogy. Simply a classic, one of the masterpieces of the movies. The plots, the camera work - the lines - the struggle over the generations, revenge - classic. Lines like "leave the gun, take the canoli", "Bonarseta, what have I done to insult you", "one day, and that day may never come, I may call upon you to do a service for me" add to these the famous theme music and you have a great package.
To fully appreciate all the characters and whats going on in the trilogy you need to watch it 3 or 4 times.

Given that the Godfather is so loved and respected EA games were treading on dangerous ground in making a game on the movie.

Having played the game on the Playstation portable I must say EA pulled it off. The game it faithful to the movie whilst allowing free play as well. They pulled this off by having you play two story lines in the games - one follows the original movie and the other allows you to build an empire in New York.

In the movie plot you are a new young punk brought into the family slowly increasing your rank as you complete missions for the family - like beating up the thugs who tried to rape Boneseta's daughter, wacking paulie. Along with these events you have other tasks to complete like getting protection money from shop keepers and back room illegals like brothels and gambling dens. Smashing up the shop - rather than the shop keeper is the best way to achieve this goal. If you go overboard then you will fail - the idea is to intimidate, rather than exterminate - leave that for your rival gangs.

As you get money you can buy weapons upgrades and move from pistols, automatics to the street sweeper shot gun and the formidable Tommy gun - allowing you to mow down scores of your enemies. To remove really stubborn opposition you sometimes plant a bomb with big results - just make sure you can get to the exit quick enough all you will go up with the bomb - i.e. RUN!

Most of the controls are easy to use. The difficulty the PSP has with aiming (i.e. not having a mouse like a PC) is removed by having an auto aim feature for your firearms which is activated on a new target by pushing the R button. This is easy to use - but with numerous enemies trying to kill you - you will want to take them down as quick as possible.

The only difficulty I had with the controls was when you had to throw someone over a ledge, which can be tricky - first you have to get them to the ledge, lift them and then toss them - read the instruction guide for advice on how to best do this.

The voices and the characters are true to the movie - all except Michael who looks and sounds nothing like the actor. As for the rest - the Godfather, Sonny, etc they are true to the movie.

The game took me a day to polish off and the re playablity is low - once your seen the storyline - you've seen it - and hitting other gangs head quarters gets repetitive - i.e. bombing two houses - identical in each gang's headquarters - the programmers could have made each one different design to make the game more interesting.

On the whole the game was worth the $25 I paid for it. It is certainly not a kids games and has an MA 15+ rating. The game is very violent like the movie, in fact even more violent than the movie.

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