Before we get started, a bit of a warning: If you come to The Godfather II for a deep, engaging story, you’re in the wrong place. The events begin in Cuba, where Hyman Roth is announcing his retirement and dividing up his empire. Unfortunately, a group of revolutionaries end up crashing the party, and the entire crowd has to flee. Upon returning to New York, your character, Dominic, is given control of a family. Your task is, of course, to build your family and utilize its influence to destroy your enemies.

Naturally, this is a pretty simple premise, and it doesn’t really get more in-depth from there. Sure, there’s a strange story arc to follow, but it really doesn’t matter. After all, this is organized crime. All you need to know is that there will be plenty of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The story’s main purpose here is to serve as a propellant for the game play. Because frankly, it would be silly to blow up a business without any story-based justification, right?

Just like in your everyday life, the ultimate goal in The Godfather II is to wipe your enemies off the face of the planet. This is accomplished by taking business assets away from other families and putting them under your control. To do this, you must have a group of trustworthy men at your side. Your crew provides you with the only real firepower you’ll have when attacking your enemies, and you can only take three individuals with you at any time. These men are pulled from your family, a hierarchy of power in your crime syndicate.

The men in your family will have differing skills. One made man might be handy with a stick of dynamite, while another may know his way around a first aid kit. Balancing the abilities of the men in your crew is paramount, as some skills will present your team with more possible ways to complete each assault. A demolitions expert, for example, can blast his way through certain walls, gaining you quick access to key points in each building.

As the game progresses, you’ll be presented with opportunities to promote the men in your family. With each promotion comes a new special skill, making it much easier to create a diverse and capable crew. Additionally, you can always buy upgrades for yourself or your made men with the money accrued through your various criminal undertakings. These upgrades can be pretty pricey, but their benefits are readily apparent.

The real key, though, to running a successful crime syndicate is the strategy behind your business acquisitions. Each business can be put into two groups: crime rings and places of extortion. Owning more of the latter simply leads to increased profits. But, the more crime rings your possess, the easier your life will be. Each crime ring will have multiple locations throughout the game’s world. Owning every location in a given crime ring will adorn your family with its specific bonus. For example, taking over all four “adult entertainment” business will allow you to hire guards for a lower price, thereby making it easier to defend your properties without cutting into your bottom line. However, these bonuses don’t just apply to your family. If a rival syndicate owns a monopoly of a given crime ring, they’ll be able to utilize its benefits, too. Send your soldiers to bomb a strategic location before your next attack, and your enemies will no longer wear their bulletproof vests.

The entire crime ring system provides an added layer of strategy to your team’s actions. It certainly won’t make an enormous impact on your family’s success, but it will make you think twice when planning your next move. And once you gain hold of certain crime rings, you’ll become much warier to enemy attacks on your businesses.

The entire game is divided into three separate environments: New York, Florida, and Cuba. The cities are relatively small, and it’s tough to decide if this is beneficial or detrimental to the overall experience. On one hand, it can be nice knowing you don’t have to drive for 15 minutes just to reach your next target. On the other hand, the areas can feel very cramped at times. With the largest city taking roughly 2 minutes to traverse, there’s not much room for police chases, and there’s essentially no reason to explore the environments at all. The entire experience feels like small jumps between each target with an empty void in between each attack.

The most frustrating points of my experience all seemed to be tied to a lazy story mechanic being thrown into the mix. Forgive me if I’m just being negative, but sloppy stealth missions have no place in a game that was clearly not built for stealth game play. And, a piece of the story that somehow takes away 90% of the properties I had spent hours acquiring is absolutely ludicrous. Some of the events that take place through the game simply seem like filler, as if the game ended up being too short and the developers felt they needed to add another 5 hours to the title.

Towards the latter stages of the game, your actions will start to feel very repetitive. Taking over each business offers little challenge, and the process of hiring guards and sending soldiers to defend your properties simply becomes a rinse-and-repeat experience. This is, most likely, a result of the half-assed attempt at adding superficial length to the game.

There is a multiplayer facet to The Godfather II, but there’s hardly any substance to it. There are only four game modes (Team Deathmatch, Demolition Assault, FireStarter, and Safecracker), and a couple of them play almost identically. Of course, weapon licenses and cash earned online can be brought into your single-player campaign, but the rewards hardly outweigh the monotony of the game’s multiplayer experience. More than anything, it feels like a tacked-on game mode that was only added so EA could list it on the back of the box.

Graphically, there’s nothing too special about The Godfather II. The game looks somewhat average overall. But if there’s a benefit to the title’s mediocrity, it’s that it allows it to perform very consistently. Over the course of roughly 13 hours of game play, I only encountered one or two instances of slow down, along with a couple missing textures. But overall, there’s nothing that will distract you from the game itself.

The Godfather II is a tricky little game. The first half of your experience as a Don can be very fulfilling and exciting. The constant elements of strategy combined with the brute force exerted by your family offer enough variation to keep the experience fresh. Unfortunately, right around the midway point of the story, the lazy game play mechanics take hold of you, providing a couple hours of frustration and anger. The second half of the game simply feels like a copy and paste iteration on the title’s initial concepts.

If you enjoy the open-world genre, then there’s no reason to skip over The Godfather II. There is enough unique game play here to warrant, at the very least, a rental. This is not a GTA clone, and if you pass it off as such, you’ll just be missing out. Just don’t expect the game to hold your interest all the way through the closing credits.