Godfather, The

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The game is loosely based on all three block-buster films of the same name, with five levels taking the story from 1940s New York to a small US town of the 1980s. Along the way you have to wipe out an opposing family's hoods in a 1950s Las Vegas, infiltrate Hyman Roth's mansion in Havana and fight your way onto an opponent's luxurious villa in Miami. Five families are involved in a struggle to control of organized crime. Each stage offers a unique style of gameplay. The stages of New York, Las Vegas, Miami Marina etc, are classic side-scrolling action adventure / shooters in which you walk the streets and shoot thugs coming towards you or leaning and shooting from windows, appear behind shop doors or trying to throw bricks on your head. There are also incoming vehicles packed with criminals and shoot at you in the old-style mafia way (the co-driver is shooting with a Tommy Gun). If you sustain too many shots the game is over. As long as you progress, you need to find certain objects (even by climbing up some platforms) in order to proceed to the next screens (sub-stages). Be noted that there are several innocent people walking the streets and each time you accidentally shoot one, the "family disgrace" meter (!) lowers until you end up with a game over for wiping out too many humble civilians. At the end of each of the 5 street stages, there is a pseudo 3D shooting galore gameplay in which you find yourself inside a bar or a mansion and you have to wipe out enemies that appear from behind handy bits of scenic camouflage (like the bar, furniture etc). Brilliant graphics here! Well, the game really reminds us of Lost Patrol (Ocean) in terms of graphics quality and gameplay! Yes this is a great game with lots of action (although a bit slow) and hard at times. Its name and its great visuals made this old-style shooter a brilliant title and really worth to play, at least the Amiga version (the Atari ST version, although it looks good, it's totally frustrating as too many slowdowns and terrible scrolling occur due to hardware limitations). Not to mention the disk swapping in both versions (6 disks)!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Atari ST version offers some great background graphics and convey each decade and location brilliantly but using only 16 colors on screen and thus degrades the quality compared to the superior Amiga and PC versions. The different locations are superb and the atmosphere is harnessed greatly! The sprites are well designed and but there are too many frame rate drops when the screen is crowded. The sound on the ST is good with a handful of ambient sound effects (not sampled) and a nicely composed 20s music during gameplay.