Kabam, an online game developer, is bringing The Godfather to Facebook with their newest browser-based game, The Godfather: Five Families. They’re currently testing their beta and inviting select users, who sign up on their website, to play. I signed up, got access to the beta several days ago, and quickly began the arduous journey into the heart of some good ol’ mafia warfare.
Capiche this
The premise of Five Families is simple. You first choose to be in one of five families at war with each other: the Corleones, Straccis, Cuneos, Barzinis, and Tattaglias. Within the game, the only thing that separates these families are inconsequential differences in appearance and backstory. I chose the Cuneo family merely because they had a really cool picture where a couple of guys in trenchcoats walk away from a car on fire, and also because I didn’t want to be cliche by picking the Corleone family.
From that point onward, Five Families plays almost exactly like Kabam’s other browser-based MMO strategy games, like Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot. In an expansive New York City, you have control of a neighborhood where you can build buildings that produce resources, increase your population, and allow you to create units. Within your neighborhood, you also have an estate, where you can build up defenses, research new technology, and unlock new units and bonuses. Outside your neighborhood are other players’ neighborhoods, bandit outposts, and slums that you can attack to get more resources. The goal? Expand across the city, stave of elimination, and potentially become the mafia don of your chosen family.
My humble estate
So, do I like Five Families? Meh. First of all, I’m an admittedly picky gamer. I’m also a very graphics-oriented person, and as far as art and UI design goes, Five Families has nagging flaws. The art style makes for a cluttered screen, and beyond that, the heavily-stylized UI is poorly organized. There’s also so much ancillary art that it takes a while to distinguish between what you can interact with and what’s just decoration. During city view, it’s hard to differentiate what’s what because everything looks similar, and within your neighborhood, the UI frustratingly blocks plots of land. This all combines to make it hard and unpleasant to navigate the game. This is sad because Five Families does have beautiful art in and of itself, but used within the game, that art makes for a difficult playing experience. Like many online browser-based games, Five Families survives off micro-transactions, where you can pay real world money to buy in-game powerups, and I believe that this unfairly vests power in the biggest wallets and the most addicted.
New York is a complicated city. Don't get lost.
All and all, Five Families is a game that’s almost an exact carbon copy of its predecessors. It definitely lacks creativity, but it does have one thing that the others don’t and that’s one of the most iconic titles in world. Kabam wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Maybe it doesn’t have to. What do you think? Do you have what it takes to be the Godfather?
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyurQFB7Gbo&feature=player_embedded’]
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