Review: The Godfather: The Game

So you’re picking through old games at the local shop, or you’re clicking through the bargain pages of a web site.  Either way, you come across The Godfather: The Game (the version discussed here is the PS2 version, though it also came out on the P.C., X-Box, and pretty much every other console and hand-held system available at the time; there shouldn’t be much difference between the PS2, X-Box, and P.C. versions, but the PS2 version is the only one I’ve played), and you’re pondering picking it up.  Sure, you can go off reviews written when the game was new—but what was cool as a fresh bowl of vichyssoise then may be trifling better than week-old, lumpy oatmeal now.  So how’s one to know?  That’s what I’m here for.

Developed and published by Electronic Arts, the game was released mid-March in ‘Oh-Six around the world (save for Korea, who got it near the beginning of March for the PS2).  It was a bit of a gamble, really; the last film in the series was released around sixteen years previous, and the first one, on which the game is more or less based, was released around thirty-four years previous.  It was a bit of a risk that any gamer of the then-current generation would have watched the movie, much less enjoyed it enough to want to play a licensed game.

On the other hand, the second movie-based Spider-Man game was released just two years previous, to positively rave reviews across the board.  Any weaknesses or flaws in the game were overshadowed by the unrelenting fun.  It was, quite possibly, one of the first really great licensed tie-in games.  To be sure, it was the first to be so popular.  It was also one of the ones to start getting people to stop calling open-world games “G.T.A. clones” and instead use the term “sandbox-style”, a term now so popular most of us would hardly believe the concept was ever called anything else.

As you can see, there was precedent for gamers to accept a licensed tie-in game and thus make it a financially viable prospect.  Still, though—quite a risk.  The Godfather trilogy isn’t something I think Electronic Arts could have counted on most teenagers and young adults to have seen.

It also could work in the opposite direction, though—someone who had never seen the movies but tried the game, they are more likely to check out the movies and thus spend money on them.  While I have no real proof that Electronic Arts has such ties to Paramount Pictures, the company behind the movies, Paramount is a subsidiary of Sony, so it’s at least rather likely.

That isn’t to say it’s a bad thing.  The films are art, they really are.  They’re also important bits of history; their success were a large part of what started the real mob on changing from the brutish thugs they really were, into the near-poetic figures concerned with “family” that they were portrayed as in fiction.

That’s a lot for a video game to live up to, especially at a time when the movement to portray games as anything but ways to kill time was still gaining momentum.  The question we’re now going to try and answer is if the video game lives up to such high hopes.

Game Play
When you start the game up for the first time, you’re treated to the Paramount Pictures logo with the intro theme to the first film, very much like the first film itself.  From there, you can start a new game or mess around with the scant options in the main menu.  There really isn’t much to them; the Family Secrets section has what secrets you’ve unlocked by collecting hidden film reels and completing certain missions, and at this point obviously you’ll have unlocked nothing.  In the Options menu, you have most of the standard things you’d expect—you can mess with your camera controls, your audio set-up, and see the lay-out of the controller showing you what button does what, though you can’t remap the controls.

Once you start a new game you’ll be asked whether or not you want to play the prelude.  This is a great idea; if you’re coming back to it and just want to jump on in, you can.  If not, you can see the back story to your character (his default name is Aldo, though you can change it; for this review, however, we’re going to go with the default), after which you get to make Aldo.

At first glance, it seems like the character creation isn’t very robust.  On the other hand, the limitations do make sense, and they help keep resources where they’ll be more useful.  Since Aldo is male and Italian, two things you obviously shouldn’t change (that era, especially for fictional mobsters, was very pro-testosterone, and very anti-non-Italians), you focus on things like beauty marks, size and shape of various parts of his head and body, and so on.

Also, there are a lot of “advanced options”, so you can do things like make the bridge of the nose flat, or bulbous, or look broken; you can make the nostrils flare, maybe the tip of the nose tiny, and so on.  You have similar depth to the rest of the face.

After you make Aldo (you have the option of fiddling with his clothing, but you have no money at the start), you have the option of renaming him.  After a cut-scene, you start another tutorial.

Aldo is getting beaten up by a pair of young punks, and Luca Brasi, one of the Don’s men who tend to dirty jobs, teaches you how to fight them.  It’s actually necessary, since the melee combat is so different compared to most games.  It uses the thumb sticks for attacks.  Pressing up is a light attack, and pressing down then up is a heavier attack.  The hand-to-hand combat is effective, though it’s a bit of a mental juggle to remember dodging, weaving, straight jabs, roundhouse punches, and such.  It’s a simple system in design, but not so simple in execution.

You go through a few more tutorials, with the last one you have to go through before you’re officially allowed to do pretty much whatever you want being on extorting a business and paying off the police.  There are two ways to do that last; pay off a patrolman or a chief.  Paying off a patrolman nets you a limited amount of “protection” time, where you can do nearly whatever you want and the police won’t go after you.  Paying off a chief nets you more time.

There are a few more tutorials, and afterward you can continue with the story missions or not.  If you don’t, you have a large city at your disposal—you have Midtown, Hell’s Kitchen, Brooklyn, and New Jersey to run around in, as well as Little Italy, your starting area.

From that early, you can work on knocking over businesses and rackets, you can work on finding safes to blow up, and if you’re feeling gutsy you can try to take on “hubs” and family compounds.  If you try the latter too early in the game, you’ll end up with most of your guts on the pavement, so.

One interesting mechanic is the melee combat, as mentioned earlier.  Using the sticks instead of buttons, you dodge and weave, grapple and throw punches.  It’s not the most fluid of systems, especially since there aren’t a lot of games that use such a set-up.  It requires the player to think a bit more on what action causes what reaction, which takes you out of the game a little.

That said, it’s a system with a lot of options, many of which are “Execution Styles”.  These are things like making it so an enemy is killed by a pedestrian vehicle, capping all of his joints with a firearm before letting him die, making an enemy die by going through a window, or blowing them up with explosives–the list is incredibly lengthy.  Even without worrying about Execution Styles, the melee combat is varied and fulfilling.  You can grab a guy and choke him, or swing him around to smash his head on a low brick wall, or shove your fist into his face.  You can also chuck them over a wall, engage in period-specific boxing-style fisticuffs, and such.  As said before, though, it’s simple in design but not simple in execution.

The firearm combat is no less intricate than the melee combat.  You can just fire at the enemy, or you can aim for specific spots like the knees, the head, or the hands.  That actually serves a purpose—if you’re good at the aiming, you can pick enemies off with head-shots.  It’s easier to just aim-and-fire, but when you’re outnumbered (and you will be outnumbered often) it’s better to approach it more strategically.

Each firearm can be upgraded twice (or thrice, if you grabbed certain downloadable content for the versions on the newer systems), though you generally won’t need to upgrade every weapon.  You should only need two to three, depending on your play style.  The Magnum and shotgun if you like to be more in-your-face with firearms, or the Magnum and tommy gun if you like a bit more range.

Notice how the Magnum is mentioned twice.  It only carries six bullets to start, but it is powerful as heck.  And the second upgrade, making it a Python—you’ll want it.  Whatever other weapons you favor in the game, you’ll want the Python.  Aside from the insane chamber upgrade, it could probably stop a bull elephant dead in its tracks.

Another mechanic to talk about is driving vehicles.  Each car and truck feels distinctly different from each other, but most are somewhat difficult to drive.  They’re possibly more true-to-life than driving tends to be in other sandbox games, but it’s still rather unwieldy.  The vehicles—especially the trucks—tend to be lumbering, ungainly things that are difficult to steer.  The sports cars, on the other hand, tend to be quite nice to steer, and they are pretty speedy, to boot.

A tangential element of driving is the horn.  In most games the horn is just this side of useless.  Here, however, people will actually get out of the way when you mash on the thing.  That’s surprising, and very handy.  The numerous times you’ll need to zoom from one end of the map to another, you’ll be mashing on the horn to weave through traffic.

You can also use it somewhat strategically.  There will be times when you’ll be chased, so you might want to not mash the horn.  You can weave around cars and use them as obstacles for your pursuers.  You can also honk the horn to get other cars to start pulling over, and duck around just in time to get them directly behind you so your pursuers slam into them.

Thinking about driving, one interesting thing to note is that pedestrians will dive out of the way of your car.  That makes sense, and it’s handled mostly well as the scripting has them diving away from the direction your car is going relative to them—E.G., if you’re heading more to their right, they’ll dive to their left.  That makes sense, but you can trick the scripting by aiming in one direction and swerving to the other as the pedestrians dive.  If, of course, you’re into that sort of thing, that is.

The missions are set up to mirror the events of the first movie, though as a matter of course some events happen a little differently.  For example, in the film, Sonny’s death at the toll booth isn’t witnessed by anyone, but in the game, Aldo isn’t too far behind him—too far to do anything, of course, but close enough to watch.

Some missions aren’t from the movie, and that’s where the game tries to spike the difficulty.  One that sticks out is basically a timed mission, though set up more as “stop the guy from reaching his destination”.  He races through a warehouse and if he reaches his destination, it’s game over.  Naturally, it’s not that easy to stop him, since he apparently is wearing Kevlar pajamas or something.  Like a few others, it’s one of those missions where if you try to go through it as intended, it will be frustratingly difficult, but if you know what’s coming and plan accordingly (or use a guide/walkthrough), you can usually make it a good bit easier on yourself.

That’s actually true of a good number of missions.  As intended, most of them can be aggravatingly difficult, but there’s usually—not always, but usually—a way you can make them easier on yourself.  With some, it’s as easy as literally approaching from a different direction, where with others, you have to take certain steps to either eliminate a rival family or some similar complex task. On the one hand, that’s irritating, since being so frustrated at a game is rarely fun.  On the other hand, whether intended or not they do promote lateral thinking.

Another mechanic we’ve seen numerous times in numerous games is Respect.  Respect is useful for gaining levels, and there are numerous ways to get it.  From wearing certain clothes, to completing certain story and side missions, to completing Execution Styles, and more—there are plenty of ways to get Respect.  Also, thankfully, you can’t lose Respect.  So you could do the most boneheaded of stunts, and still not be thought of any less by your peers.

The leveling system can be thought of as “R.P.G.-light”, using Respect in lieu of experience points.  Gain enough Respect, and you go up a level.  Go up a level, and not only do you get a boost to your health meter as well as get more money as your cut from extortion (more on that in a bit), you can also raise one of five stats: Fighting, Shooting, Health, Speed, and Street Smarts.  You only get one point, and each stat can be raised ten times, so—for those doing the math at home—fifty is the maximum level.

Fighting increases your damage, grapple time, and negotiation pressure; Shooting increases your aiming speed, aiming precision, and the chance of disarming your enemy; Health increases your health, your health recovery, and your blocking defense; Speed increases your Sprint duration, attack speed, movement speed, weapon reloading, and weapon concealing/revealing; and Street Smarts decreases the Heat and Vendetta earned (the former is how much you’ve annoyed the cops, the latter how much you’ve annoyed another family), how long it takes to reveal someone’s breaking point, how many thrown weapons you can carry, and it gives you the ability to steal parked cars without accruing Heat.

One interesting way to gain Respect is through prostitutes.  It’s not the same way as, say, a Grand Theft Auto game, though—in most hotels, in a room near your own, there are two prostitutes in their period-specific underwear (which is to say, covering a lot more than they would in modern versions of underwear) dancing to period music.  Go up to one and attempt an interaction, basically a mild or more racy one.  It doesn’t get racier than Aldo smacking the prostitute’s posterior, however.

Anyway, if your flirt succeeds, you gain a little Respect, and if it doesn’t, well—nothing.  Again, you can’t lose Respect.  It’s not a mechanic you can abuse, though; prostitutes will only be “available” for the flirtation once in a while.  On the other hand, they’re near your room in almost every hotel-based safe house, so if you focused on just them you could zip around from hotel to hotel.  Also, you don’t need to have purchased the hotel room to “access” the prostitutes.

One minor but interesting thing is the random non-player character (N.P.C.) chatter.  If you pay enough attention to them, you can hear the pedestrians (and some random mooks) carry on conversations with each other.  A small but nice touch, that.

Mentioned a few paragraphs ago, there are two meters for how annoyed you’ve made people.  Heat is how annoyed the cops are with you, and Vendetta is how annoyed the other families are with you.

Heat is the easier one to deal with.  You can pre-empt it to a degree by bribing police officers, whether beat cops or chiefs.  Beat cops can be found sometimes just wandering around, but there doesn’t seem to be a given area for them, a section you can point to and say they’ll always be there, save for usually right outside the police station.

The thing is, if you’re going to be at the police station, you might as well bribe the chief.  It’s a good bit more expensive, but it lasts a lot longer.  On the other hand, it can be completely erased if you get to the maximum wanted level, five gold shields.  So it’s not exactly the best system.

You can also erase shields by returning to a safe house, though it will always leave you with two.  That’s actually more manageable, as you can bribe a beat cop to make sure no police come after you while at that level.

The Vendetta system is somewhat similar, though instead of the police, it’s the other families who are annoyed at you.  There are four other families besides the Corleones, each controlling another section of the map, and if you have a high Vendetta with that family, they will come after you on sight.  Even though they do control their own sections of the map, there are still businesses and such in other areas, so just because you have a blood feud with a family, you won’t necessarily be safe by staying away from their area.

Eventually your Vendetta level gets so high as to cause a mob war to erupt.  If it does, you’re given around forty-eight minutes (I say “around” because those seconds tick a lot faster than they should) to end it.  If you lose the mob war, you lose your businesses (more on your businesses in just a moment), so it obviously behooves you to win.  You can win in one of two ways: One, bombing an enemy business or compound, and two, bribing an F.B.I. agent.

The latter is usually the way to go, though they do take three grand.  On the other hand, you might not have easy access to a bomb, and even if you did it’s not always easy to get into an enemy business—and it’s never easy to get into an enemy compound.

The G-men are spread around the map, one in each section.  You can usually find them in churches, and they’ll happily take your three grand to end the mob war (ostensibly by putting the screws to the other families).  However, if your Heat level is too high, they’ll happily pull out their gun and start shooting as soon as they see you.  So if you have a high Wanted level and you’ve started a mob war, it’s best to deal with the Wanted level first.

So you have clothes to deal with, upgrading your weapons, paying bribes, and so much more—that’s a lot of money.  There are numerous ways to get more—for starters, you can take over businesses.  You find the proprietor of the store in question and smack him around, intimidate him, or smash up his shop—eventually he’ll break and agree to pay the Corleones.  You get a cut of this, paid once a week, and how big your cut is depends on your Respect level.

Another way to get money is to knock over banks.  As should be expected, that isn’t as easy as it sounds.  On the other hand, the reward is substantial.  Depending on the bank, you can get many thousands of dollars (and remember when this game takes place; a thousand bucks was a lot back then)—the only catch is you have to get to your safe house with it.

The minute you leave the bank you’ll have the police on you, and like so many games where there are police, they aren’t interested in merely arresting you.  However, if you get back to your safe house, you’ll lower your Wanted level and get to keep the money.

Story
If you’ve seen the first film, you have a pretty good idea of the story.  The game actually follows it pretty well for the most part, though it follows Aldo, a character created for the game.  Through him, you watch the Corleones rise in power—and have a big hand in it.

In the prelude, we start in Little Italy, New York City, Nineteen Thirty-Six.  We see Aldo’s parents, who are almost killed when a nearby store goes up in flames.  They get separated by members of a rival family, then, in a weird but nice way to give you a miniature tutorial, they let you have control of Aldo’s father as he fends off his attackers.

He succeeds—but then is cut down by two more rival family members with tommy guns.  A young Aldo sees his father’s dead body, and is talked to by the Godfather himself, who basically says that Aldo will one day get to have his revenge.

Over the course of the story, Aldo takes part, or even takes the primary role, in nearly every major event from the movie.  He helps deliver the horse head in that famous scene, he’s in the hospital when the other family’s men come, and so on.

For the most part, though, he fits.  The story is crafted such that it feels natural for him to be so involved.  It might not have quite the breadth or depth of the film, but it doesn’t miss that mark by a terribly wide margin.  Further, its cohesion makes it truly its own story, and not just a half-baked “rehash” of the film.

To that end, there is an entire sub-plot devoted to Aldo, more than just him getting revenge for the death of his father.  As the Corleones rise to power, he falls in love, and has to balance that with everything else.  It’s woven into the “A” plot wonderfully and believably, without overshadowing it.

Graphics
Everything really looks good, it really does.  It won’t stand up to many of today’s games, where the character models are so complex and detailed you can almost see capillaries.  There are also a few occasions of “over-acting” of the character models’ faces, but they aren’t often and they aren’t terribly egregious, so they’re nearly unnoticeable and forgivable.

The models look very good, with the “main” characters looking very distinct from each other, and—Michael Corleone aside—very much like the actors who played them in the film.  The pedestrians, prostitutes, and other non-main N.P.C.s are rather cookie-cutter, but there is a large variety in the former.  In the case of the prostitutes, you have—two.  On the other hand, it’s easy to tell which one you want to talk to, since they’re the same model almost, if not, every time, but still.  It makes the similarity in hotels (which we’ll get into in a moment) all the more jarring.

Most of the time, the copy-and-paste nature of the non-main N.P.C.s isn’t really noticeable since there’s such a large variety of them, save for the Chiefs of Police.  Each of the five sections has one, and they’re all the same.  You’ll be seeing them rather frequently, and since the police stations, too, look alike, in the course of dealing with them you might forget exactly which section of the city you’re in.  The same can mostly be said for the F.B.I. agents, but you shouldn’t see them nearly as often, so it shouldn’t really be an issue.

The buildings look especially good; at a glance you can get a “feel” for which part of the city you’re in.  Midtown has kind of a “ritzier” look to the exterior of the buildings, contrasting with the the poorer feel of Little Italy, contrasting with the middle-class feel of New Jersey, and so on.  I almost think they couldn’t have done a better job making the city feel more believable if they tried.

The interiors look very good as well, but the drawback is that the interiors get recycled.  A lot.  If you’ve seen one compound (or doctor’s office, or restaurants, or butcher shop, or barber shop…), you really have seen them all.  For all of the many hotels scattered around the five sections of the city, there are only, at best, three variations of interiors, and since hotels will be the most common type of safe house you’ll have access to by far, they’ll get recognizable quickly.  For some, it may get to a point of becoming very old, very quickly.

Sound
Before we get to anything else, let me just say that the characters sound mostly fantastic.  It is such a wonderful surprise that so many actors from the first film came back to reprise their role.  In fact, it would be easier and quicker to list those who didn’t reprise their role: Marlon Brando (he technically did do some voice work for the game; however, his health was failing at that time and affected his voice.  As such, in the end, they didn’t use what he had recorded), Richard S. Castellano (he played Peter Clemenza; died in ‘Eighty-Eight), Al Pacino (his likeness was contracted to another company for Scarface: The World is Yours, and thus Electronic Arts couldn’t use him in Godfather; however, a character named Michael Corleone does appear, but doesn’t look or sound like Pacino), Lenny Montana (he played Luca Brasi in the films; died before production of the game started), Tom Rosqui (he played Rocco in the first two films), Don Costello (Don Stracci), and Richard Bright (he played Al Neri).  There might be a few others, but those are from the main cast.

The stand-ins for the actors who didn’t lend their voices to the game are mostly excellent.  The first time I played, I didn’t even realize it was Garry Chalk instead of Lenny Montana doing the voice of Brasi.  The actors, one and all, are giving it their best and you can really tell.

There are a few cases of the fake “Noo Yawk” accent, but those are few and mere traces.  Everyone sounds how you’d expect them to; it may not be “realistic”, but it’s what we expect from watching so many gangster movies.  The dames sound like dames, the tough guys sound like tough guys, and the pedestrians sound like normal Joes—until you grab a random pedestrian and beat them silly before tossing them off of a bridge.  In that case, they’ll scream and rant and insult you and other such expected things.

The music, by Bill Conti and Ashley Irwin, is reminiscent of the first movie.  Though obviously inspired by the score for the first film, by Nine Rota, it takes those cues and sticks to them in certain parts, but uses them as a springboard in others.  It all works pretty well, to make the game feel very much like the movie.  There’s the slow, sweeping orchestral reminiscent of the film, and a more upbeat score accompanying the more fast-paced segments.  It all ties together very nicely.

For the combat, there’s the nice, dull “thud” sound when smacking someone, and each firearm sounds distinct.  I couldn’t say how true-to-life they sound, but I can say that you won’t aurally mistake the tommy gun for the snub-nose revolver.  The Molotov cocktails have a nice “crash–fwoomp sound when you throw them.

Each vehicle sounds distinct, also.  The roadster’s roar of the engine is satisfying for even those not really “into” cars, for example.

One moderate down side is that for some N.P.C.s you’ll run into, they won’t have a lot of voice clips to choose from.  It’s not really all that noticeable since you won’t deal with most N.P.C.s all that often, though two in particular do stick out—the Chief of Police and the F.B.I. agent.  No matter which one you go to, they’re all the same, so they all share the voice clips.  Since you’ll be visiting them semi-often, you’ll soon get to the point where you can almost recite all of their voice clips word for word.

Replayability
There are a lot of film reels to find and Execution Styles to, well, execute.  On top of those, you have a very large “old-timey” version of New York City to run around in.  The problem is that once you beat the game and become Don, it gets rather repetitive.

By that point, if you played more strategically and planned more long-term, you’ll have already taken out the four other families and owned nearly every business, so while there are still a few “random encounters” with mooks you can rumble with, there really isn’t anyone to stop you from going bat guano nuts on the entire city.  You’ll have more than enough money to keep the police paid off and thus out of your hair, and if the heat gets too bad you can just ignore that section of town for a while.

There are safes to blow up, rackets to find and take over, and safe houses to purchase, but it’s all more of the same.  “Second verse, same as the first.”

The real fun in the game is playing through the story, whether actually doing story missions or not.  The fun is in building your empire, in watching your Respect grow.  Once you’re Don, there just isn’t much to do unless you’re a true completion-oriented gamer.

That said, there are a few fun aspects to it.  Once you get enough safe houses, you can pretty much cause as much trouble as you want, get the heat as high as you like.  If you’re terrorizing people right outside your front door, when the cops get too bad, just duck inside and head up to your safe house.  Once you’ve collected enough ammunition and weapons, you can knock out a window of your safe house and throw Molotov cocktails all day and spray every innocent bystander with bullets.  The police will hardly ever actually get up to your safe house, preferring to stay outside and shoot at you.  Plus, with the safe houses offering ammunition on most, if not all, of your weapons you’ll hardly ever need to leave.

Most of the fun comes from the story itself, not only watching the story unfold but also the missions.  In that sense, it’s a game you will want to replay from the start, but that’s not a bad thing.  Not by a long shot.

Final Recommendation
Time to share a secret.  When I first played this game, I’d never seen the movies.  Oh, to be sure, I tried, but just couldn’t get into them.  In fact, I have to admit I was bored to tears.  Many years later, I played this game and was so in love with the story that I just had to watch the first film again.  I did, and—I loved it.  My tastes in stories had changed to be able to appreciate the films.  And it was thanks to this game, how engrossing and engaging its own story is, that I realized it.

It’s such a surprise, too.  You know it’s a violent, bloody game.  You know there are numerous creative ways to kill people.  You even know that it’s based on the first film (all there in the title, after all), but—you might not know how deep the story is.  It sticks to the film’s story for the most part, but even where it deviates, it still “fits”, and fits quite nicely.

If you haven’t seen the film, this game should be a decent enough test.  If you enjoy the game, you’ll enjoy the movie.  Even if you gave the film a shot once and found you didn’t like it, this might make you decide to give the film another shot.

It certainly did that for me, and to this day I’m glad it did.

Scoring
Game Play: GOOD
There are more weapons than you can shake a stick at, plus the map is enormous, with plenty of space to run around in and explore—or get away from someone trying to make you eat a lead salad.  The hand-to-hand combat is a little unusual, but once you get used to it you shouldn’t have many problems.

Story: GOOD
It’s simply beautiful.  It retains the feel of the film, while effectively weaving in an entirely new sub-plot for the main character.  That sub-plot is no less tragic and heartwarming than the “A” plot.

Graphics: GOOD
Everything looks better than one would expect.  A game this old, a map this large, such a different but complex fighting style, one couldn’t be faulted for expecting cookie-cutter buildings and simplistic character models.  Everything looks beautiful—while they did save clock cycles by recycling certain building interiors, the exteriors are simply beautiful and truly help the player get a “feel” for which area they’re in.  The character models are equally beautiful; even the N.P.C.s look good.

Sound: GOOD
Nearly everything is grand, from the music to the voices.  The characters sound almost exactly like the actors from the film (even the ones not played by the original actors), and the music—simply wonderful.  On the other hand, the smaller choice of voice clips for certain N.P.C.s means you’ll hear them again and again.

Replayability: GOOD
Once you finish the story missions, there are still film reels to collect, Execution Styles to carry out, safes to blow up, and more—unless you did all of that before beating the story missions.  In that case, there really isn’t a whole lot to do but cause mayhem.  On the other hand, the story is so interesting and fun you’ll want to play through it again.

Final: GOOD
There’s a lot to see and do, and you’re free to explore the entire map as soon as you want.  The world is large, believable, and no matter what you want to do—if you want to just drive around and look, if you want to complete the story missions, take over rackets, or hunt down all of the extras—there’s plenty to keep you entertained.  It’s a somewhat easier game to put down and pick up, though you won’t want to.