The Godfather II, the game, is only related to the epic film trilogy in name. Sure, the characters and one or two key plot elements are included in this interactive experience, but I suspect that the only reason EA picked the name was because they already had a mildly successful run with the first Godfather title and ‘Mafia' was already taken. Either that or they realised that ‘Don Simulator 09' doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

You play as Dominic Corleone (yes, Dom the Don), who must step up to the plate soon after Aldo Trapani is assassinated in Cuba. During The Godfather you were working your way up the food chain to become the Don of New York. In the sequel, this position is yours from the start and you will be tasked with looking after Corleone interests in New York, Miami and Havana.

To complement your newfound status, the game is built around the in-game map screen called Don's View, which basically gives you a strategic, birds-eye view of the city – complete with information on businesses, guard numbers, rival families, favours, corrupt officials and the hideouts of your enemies' made men. The Don's View is a great mechanic and it almost brings an RTS element to the open-world design. As you take over more and more businesses, you'll gain the ability to order your underlings to bomb rival rackets or send one of your made men to defend a business that is being attacked.

A Made Man is a member of your ‘family', and each one is recruited by you throughout the campaign. Made men are tough sons of bitches but you'll still need to nurture them (via upgrading their skills) throughout the game in order to form a tight and effective team with which to storm rival compounds and completely destroy the other families. To give your ‘recruitment' a bit more of a tactical edge, there are various skill sets that prospective family members specialise in, each of which will help you in certain situations. For example, the bruiser is able to kick down doors, and you'll be locked out of some businesses until you find one to join your family. The same goes for cracking safes, as you'll need a made man with the safecracker skill, and an explosives expert will help you to blow through the back entrances of business to reach a cowering store owner. The medic is perhaps the most useless class, but that's primarily due to the easy nature of the game.

You'll rarely break a sweat when taking out a bunch of aggressive goons. Not only are most of the guns in the game overpowered, but the cover system makes routing the enemy an easy task, particularly as they're not the smartest virtual goons that we've seen. Just hide behind something and wait for them to make the first move.

This is not to say that the game isn't fun, because it is. Rolling up to a business, jumping out of a car and pumping some surprise shotgun rounds into the guards outside a business, instigating a takeover battle, is exhilarating stuff. And it's made all the more engaging by the feeling you get leading your own gang. Your made men are generally quite excellent at watching your six, leaving you free to search the interior for the owner so you can lay some beat down and take the premises over, gaining extra cash and expanding your empire.

From a gameplay perspective, nothing much has changed from The Godfather. You still need to intimidate business and racket owners in order to get them to work for you. Each one has a weak spot – such as being thrown against the wall, having their stock destroyed or simply hanging them over a high ledge until they crack. Finding these bonus weaknesses can be fun, but it also makes the game highly repetitive, as it's essentially all there is to the game. There are a handful of main story missions, but these often boil down to someone telling you to keep taking over the city and check back when you own enough real estate. I actually managed to speed up most of these checkpoint scenes by concentrating on owning everything that I possibly could in each area.

Godfather II does bring a couple of interesting innovations to the open world genre. Firstly, I really enjoy the strategic element that the Don's View brings to the table. Being able to send an underling to handle a turf war – and be confident that he will succeed – is a cool feeling to have in a videogame and it really does help create an aura of control. If you play your cards aggressively, you'll rarely be inundated with too many attacks, so sending a couple of your best men works quite well, leaving you free to keep attacking unclaimed areas.

I also think that the favour system, whilst flawed in how you go about it, is a great idea. As you learn more about your rival families – the Granados, Manganos, Rosato and Almeidas – you'll be able to do favours for random people on the street in exchange for information, such as the kill condition for each family's made men. This is handy in theory, but strangers on the street that know more than a Mafia Don? I don't think so. This system of doing favours for people, and then receiving information or favours in return (such as calling off police or allowing your crew to instantly recover from their injuries after being incapacitated) is a really interesting mechanic, but you'll rarely get stuck into it due to the completely incongruous execution of the idea. You'll never be forced to use it because the game never gets so difficult that you need to formulate any kind of Plan B.

The Godfather II also doesn't do itself any favours in it overall design. Each city map is fairly flat and lifeless, with constant – and at times shocking – pop in of vehicles and pedestrians. It also suffers from limited story missions, with much of the game padded out by real estate acquisition. It doesn't look that crash hot (except for some spectacular explosions), the AI is limited and the overall design is a bit budget. To illustrate, I spotted the exact same cars drive around in Cuba as in New York – complete with the same businesses painted on the side – a sure sign of a copy and paste approach.