The Godfather II Multiplayer Hands-On

Despite the underlying strategy element of the single player game, The Godfather II’s multiplayer is more about the action, with a few twists thrown in to keep things interesting. For one, the character you choose to play with isn’t just some generic soldier. He’ll be one of your soldiers from in the game, preferably someone you’ve leveled up with a ton of different skills and upgrades.

Soldiers in your family can acquire specialties, or they can have them already when you recruit them. Abilities like safe-cracking, arson, medic and demolitions are all skills that will help you in the single player game as well as multiplayer slapdowns. Members of your crew can also accrue upgrades, not unlike in an RPG. You’ll want to take your best soldiers online, the ones who’ve unlocked higher gun ratings (giving them access to better weaponry and better accuracy) or recovery time


The relative skills of your soldiers is important to being successful in some of the multiplayer game modes. It’s not all straight up Team Deathmatch, but that is there for those that love it (i.e. everyone). The four multiplayer modes include:

Fire Starter – You’ll need crew members with the Arsonist ability to light fires at specific point on the map to earn points. You don’t have to be all arsonists, in fact, it might be a good idea for a couple crack shots to help out escorting your specialists around to the different ignition points.

Safe Cracker – Again, there are points on the map (marked clearly on your in game minimap) where a specialist is needed. This time it’s safe crackers, who must get to a safe and capture it without getting killed. Again, escorting those guys around could be crucial to scoring more cash than the other team. Assault – You’ll need demolitions guys this time, who must blow up certain points on the map. Making this one a bit more interesting is that the detonation points are usually walls, which are then open as a new route to the enemy for everyone involved.

Team Deathmatch – It’s, um, team deathmatch.

Even though there’s a lot of skill specialization in The Godfather II’s multiplayer mode, one would hardly confuse it with Team Fortress. Still, the added dimension of skills and upgrades makes the game a little more than Quake II in fedoras. The Online Honors system allows you to keep what you’ve earned in multiplayer (money, upgrades, etc.) in the single player mode. Just like when you brought your buffed up guy over in the first place. But that does bring up one interesting point/flaw. You can’t really play multiplayer until you’ve recruited at least one henchman in the single player game – which you do in the first couple missions, granted. So if you were planning on jumping straight into multiplayer without even trying out the single player, forget it.

At this point, single player is looking a bit more interesting than multiplayer for The Godfather II. Of course, we’ll only know how things fully pan out once the game is released in February.
Xbox Game Facts
Platform:
Xbox 360