Obviously, the folks at Electronic Arts who made The Godfather II have been paying attention to games like Crackdown, Saints Row, and Assassin's Creed, all examples of open-world games that have a sort of strategic layer. So they have some idea of what goes into a good game. But they made Godfather II instead.

This misbegotten sequel crams Francis Ford Coppola's classic family drama into something barely worthy of a Playstation 2 and a budget price tag. The Godfather II is a bad game on so many levels. As I was playing, I constantly stumbled across "If they only..." moments in which I glimpsed how this game might have had a chance to be middling instead of actively terrible.

After the jump are seven things that could have kept Godfather II from being awful.

7) Better combat
Once you get past some obligatory early game punching, most of The Godfather II is gunfights. Sometimes you have a short drive to or from the place where you're going to shoot your guns. But the gunfights are the bulk of the gameplay. So why is it so sloppy and chaotic? Why do I simply direct my shuffling mob of sidekick mobsters to go someplace, at which point wild shooting ensues and most of the bad guys end up dead (I might have to pick off some stubborn guy stuck on the other side of a well)? Why is there no reason for me to ever equip a fellow mobster with, say, a sniper rifle or a silenced pistol? Why isn't there a better cover system considering the strangely labyrinthine levels are obviously built for combat that involves careful use of cover?

6) Better driving
You have got to be kidding me. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the driving in an open-city game like this feels like the driving in some half-assed obligatory driving sequence thrown into an action game to be quickly played and hopefully more quickly forgotten. So, really, is this how the driving is supposed to be in Godfather II? Come on, really? You guys are putting me on, right? Is this a fake copy of the game and is there a camera hidden in my house? Is Ashton Kutcher about to show up at my front door with a stupid grin and a copy of the actual game? Now to be fair, the game is set in 1959. I wasn't driving back then because I hadn't been born yet, so I didn't have my driver's license. But I'm pretty sure those old heavy cars didn't handle like slot racers. I'm also pretty sure a bunch of these muscle cars weren't invented for another ten years or so, but that's a whole other argument that this game frankly isn't good enough to start.

5) Al Pacino
They couldn't get Al Pacino for this game. And yet they still went with Michael Corleone in a prominent role. So every time this random goombah shows up and pretends he's Michael Corleone, it breaks whatever connection EA expects me to make with the movies. Take the "You broke my heart, Fredo" scene (please!). It's bad enough that the scene is motivated by something completely different than Fredo's betrayal in the movie (in the game, his screw up is relatively benign). But to have anyone other than Al Pacino doing it with John Cazale looks wrong. It would be like Humphrey Bogart telling some extra that they'll always have Paris or Darth Vader announcing to a random guy on the street that he's his father. These seminal moments between two well-known characters kind of require the presence of both characters.

4) Better strategy layer
All of this potentially cool stuff in the game is less cool when it's so pointless. I can do favors for people to unlock assassination missions, which are simply obligatory steps to unlock the final shootout at an enemy family's compound which gets me...nothing. Closer to the end, I guess. And I can do favors for scattered quest vendors to unlock bonuses I'll almost never need because the gameplay is so simple, so why bother calling in a sting operation against an enemy family when it's never a threat anyway. And I can promote my henchmen to learn skills, most of which aren't necessary, because a lockpick's as good as a kicked door which is as good as a blown wall so it doesn't matter. And I can unlock ridiculous looking bulletproof vests and armored cars I never need and reduced guard costs that don't matter, since money is mainly used to buy skills that aren't important because I'm never going to need my henchmen to know how to do the snap neck move, to do extra hand-to-hand damage, or to recover from an arrest faster. The strategic layer is a set of features that aren't necessary. And what's more, you really think I'm going to bother playing online just so I can equip my henchmen with upgraded weapons that have no discernible effect on the game?

3) Make it make sense
This shows every sign of a game cobbled together from features with no consideration for how well they relate to each other. Why do my henchman instantly teleport wherever I send them, so it rarely matters which henchman are with me at any given time, since I can essentially beam them in whenever I need them? And yet I have to drive myself to the airport. Why are all these cars jammed up at this intersection? Why the vicious trash talk that would fit just fine in the recent 50 Cent game but here feels forced and inappropriate? Why are there housewives throwing dice on the sidewalk? Why does everyone nurse some bitter grudge against someone else that can only be addressed with a beating at best, but more often a straight-up murder? Why are there palm trees in New York? Why are the same topless women from the brothel running around at the city incinerator?

2) Lose the stealth missions
The first Godfather game had a stealth mission in which you sneaked into the Hollywood producer's house and put the horse's head under his covers. You might expect that in The Godfather II, you have to sneak out onto Lake Tahoe to assassinate Fredo. Close. Instead, you have to sneak into Cuba to garrote a bunch of soldiers whose backs are conveniently turned and then you assassinate Fidel Castro. I did not make that up. Spoiler: you will fail many times, including the time you supposedly succeed.

1) Better cities
This is what absolutely killed The Godfather II for me. If you give me an impressive location, I'm okay with middling gameplay. I say this as someone who spent upwards of 80 hours in Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City, an absolutely amazing place that serves as the setting for a middling game. But Godfather II takes place in a New York, Miami, and Havana that are are soulless, chintzy, ugly, primitive, and sloppy. Not to mention that they look nothing like their real world counterparts, in the 50s or at any other time. The streets are filled with twos of vehicles at a time, some of which appear before your very eyes, but almost never when you're running down the road looking for a ride. The locations offer no joy when it comes to exploration or gunfights or any sort of uesful functionality. The drawing distance is woefully close and there's a truly astonishing lack of detail, as if they game was built to scale down to the Playstation 2. Instead of activity, there's just brittle scripting and occasional chaos. And all these places feel small and petty. This is the antithesis of a living world. If any one of these cities was even remotely interesting or carefully crafted, The Godfather II might have held up under some of its other problems. But what kind of open-world game you can have when the "world" part of the equation is so poorly done?