When Electronic Arts first unveiled its plans for The Godfather: The Game, a "reimagining" of Francis Ford Coppola's classic film, the smart money landed on the project being a disaster. Now that the game has been released, however, the smart money has been proven wrong. The Godfather in video-game form isn't a disaster, it's merely a sizeable blunder—the latest and most egregious example of game developers having a chronic case of cinematic envy, but it is not an entirely worthless endeavor.

In the game, you play a low-level flunky trying to work his way up the Corleone family ladder. Mainly this entails extortion, fisticuffs, and Grand Theft Auto–like missions throughout a well-designed Manhattan playground. During the game's early missions your guide is Luca Brasi, the eager mouth-breather whose slow wits led him to walk into a wire necktie in the original film—an odd choice, given his relatively minor role in the epic, but one that serves a purpose. The Godfather, you see, runs parallel to The Godfather film, with many of the film's key sequences—Brasi's grisly murder, the horse head in the studio chief's bed, the gun stashed for Michael behind the toilet tank—being used to help propel the game along. Creatively this ranks with the greatest muggings of all time, and artistically it outright fails (EA's megabyte muscle can in no way match Gordon Willis's still-exquisite camerawork), but there is some joy to be had in playing through the film's classic moments.

Unfortunately, that joy turns out to be fleeting once it fully hits you just how bankrupt the entire endeavor is. It's a bankruptcy that extends to James Caan, Robert Duvall, and, posthumously, Marlon Brando, each of whom offered up his vocal talents in the game for what was no doubt an obscene amount of cash. Such whoring on their parts may not be surprising, but that doesn't make it any less disappointing, especially since their involvement adds an air of validity to the project that the end result in no way earns. (Al Pacino declined to participate, and Coppola has outright denounced the game.) Without the talents of Caan, Duvall, and Brando (who was most likely batshitcrazy when he signed on the dotted line), EA's gambit would have been revealed for what it really is: a blatant money grab. Instead it appears legitimate.

Some parts of The Godfather do work. The storyline is suitably epic, the attention to detail is impressive, and the gameplay solid. But in the end, no amount of minor graces can fully rescue what was, from its inception, a misguided venture. And it's a mistake soon to be repeated, for hot on The Godfather's heels is Scarface: The Game from developer VU. No doubt ideas for The French Connection: The Game are being sketched out on a dry-erase board as we speak.