The Backlog Episode 9 (Day 59): The Godfather: Blackhand Edition

Another week goes by and another backlog title comes up. Tonight we travel back to the 30s in the streets of Little Italy as we play the newest recruit in the Corleone family’s organization. Personally picked as a favor by Don Corleone himself, you begin your climb from just a street thug to a made-man in the organization. And after a few hours I can honestly say I see some promise in this game, and, given time to get used to some of it’s lesser points, I could really enjoy this game. However, it’s also a shame because it’s clear those lesser points are because this version for the Nintendo Wii was clearly ported from more traditionally controlling platforms. Allow me to explain.

When the game opens up you begin wandering with Luca from the movie teaching you to fight by having you beat the shit out of the thugs that until that moment you were running with. Pretty bad-ass mafia stuff, and while the controls are not perfect, you hold down a button and lock onto your target and punch forward/round-house style to do as he says… and it feels very satisfying to be quite honest.

And after showing you how to save your game by guiding you to your safe house, you begin shaking people down for protection money and beating two thugs down who send a young woman to the hospital. Again, more smacking things and people around and equal parts satisfying as hell kicking their asses and awkward as the controls work “well enough” to get the job done. And then you get to learning to shoot…. and the game immediately makes what I mean obvious as the gunplay rather then relying on your pointer by default and using the buttons to control cover and movement, goes to an auto-aim garbage that wont let your cursor leave who it’s locked onto… for a pointing controller. It’s clunky, awkward and all together too easy as you basically take cover, hold a button and pull the trigger on the wiimote to kill just about anyone.

I think when the time comes to play this game, I will enjoy it overall, but I can’t help but feel like that gunplay is telling me I have the second-rate port of the game, and if I ever find it for the PC or even another console, I should consider replacing my copy with the ones they actually developed the game for, no matter how satisfying it is to basically box thugs on the street into their demise as it is with this game.

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