I had no idea how addictive this title was going to be, I played it for about 9 hours on Thursday and shot through the story with some speed. You play as a newly appointed don of your own family known as Dominic. What I really liked about this, is you recruit your own troops who all have their individual specialities. If you have to destroy some property you can either take a demolition specialist and blow the building up or take an arsonist and start lighting the place up while you smash up the goods with a baseball bat. the game gives you a few choices to do things which helps break up the monotony of taking copious amounts of territories .
The game pretty much centers around you taking the territories off of the rival families. You have to take over every territory a family owns before you can completely destroy them. You can weaken them by assassinating their made men. Doing this stops them trying to take over your territories and makes it easier when you eventually have to destroy their compound. Once you take a territory you have to appoint guards to defend it, they will not always survive on there own so you either have to go yourself or send some of your men to help defend. You can send your men to take over territories as well which can speed up the process.
If you press start you bring up the Dons View which gives you a complete overlay of the city your in showing the different territories and who owns them. This is great for deciding where and when to attack.
You get a bonus for controlling every business in one crime ring. If you control all diamond importers then you and your family get bullet proof vests. The best thing is to try and take down one ring at a time so you can use the benifits.What surprised me so much about this game was the RPG element. Being able to control your family, upgrade them, choose their weapons, it was much more than I expected. Sure, the game is very repetitive in places but I have had great fun playing through it. I'm on the last part now and I can say for sure that I'll be playing it for a few days yet.
The worst parts of the game are the driving, you never fell like your going fast which for me is a definite drawback. The biggest glaring fault is the lack of animation for falling. If you walk off a building you just float down to the ground and stroll away. Its actually quite funny but I don't think next gen games, especially sandbox games should have such lazy errors.
If your a fan of GTA/sandbox games then you should definitely pick this up.
