Gameplay

This game is fun. There's no other way to say it. It's flawed in many ways, but above all else, it's fun. One of the reasons it's fun is because it sticks closely to what makes the GTA games fun; missions in a big, free-form world, where you can do pretty much anything you want.

The story missions are the meat of the game, and they end way too soon. Your character is an associate for about half the missions, then you very quickly become a soldier, then a capo, then underboss. After you become underboss, the story is over, and all that is left is to take out the other four families.

Many of the story missions tie into the movie very well. Remember when the movie producer wakes up to find a little 'present' in his bed? You get to sneak past his guards and plant that package in his bed, and watch the scene re-enacted within the game engine. Very cool. You'll also be asked to put a few thugs to sleep—with the fishes, see?

However, the ultimate goal of the game is to become Don of New York, and to do that, you have to extort every business and take over every racket in New York, and blow up all the other families' compounds and steal their shipping hubs. Extortion is hard at first, but it quickly becomes repetitive. Remember how I said the locations are all copies of each other? You'll find the same bar with different people in it, the same flower shop, the same barber shop, the same hotel. The real kicker is that the hubs, shipping operations, and compounds—supposedly major locations—are all EXACTLY THE SAME. You'll find the same guards in the same locations in every place. Sometimes you can walk right in and offer your protection, but sometimes, you need to rough up the owner or destroy their shop a little bit. This is fun until you realize that often all you need to do is pull out a gun and point it at them for a little while.

As far as aiming that gun goes, you can tell this game is a console game at heart. The lock-on function is unbelievable. Hold down the right mouse button and you lock on to your target's heart. You can then aim, slowly, around their body. While this might be good for a gamepad, it really makes playing with a mouse a piece of cake. The hand-to-hand fighting controls are actually pretty good, allowing for a lot of complicated maneuvers to thrash your enemies around.

If you kill too many members of a rival family, they'll start a mob war. You then have about 45 minutes to do one of two things: blow up a business of theirs, or bribe an FBI agent.

Here's where the game starts to get out of whack. The money system is completely ridiculous. The most expensive safehouse in the game is $150,000. The most expensive gun upgrade in the game is $500,000. To bribe an FBI agent, which causes you to win a MOB WAR in the process, is $3,000. Yes, a half-million dollars for a gun in the 1940s, (Which is sold by a guy you SHOULD be able to easily kill and steal it from) and three grand to bribe an FBI agent. Because I had this to fall back on, I could kill any mobster wearing the wrong color jacket and pay a quick three grand to end the war. I made three grand from a single hotel's protection money every week.

And you do start a lot of mob wars. After you've started the first one, the 'vendetta' level goes up pretty fast. If that 45-minute timer runs out, or you die, the other family will bomb 2 of your businesses and that's it. There's no attack on your compound, no one putting out a contract on you, just a few businesses lost. No big deal.

I finished every mission, took over every business and eliminated every rival family in about 17 hours or so. I had a few contract killings left, so if you're a real gamer and you do everything this game has to offer, you can probably finish it completely in somewhere from 15-20 hours.