The presentation begins with developers assuring us at some length of the previous game’s financial success. It seems of little importance next to what we remember: a game that fell far short of matching its potential, juggling various systems but fumbling their interaction with each other, ineptly handling both the staples of gunplay and driving on which the game placed too much emphasis.

To what extent are these failings addressed in this most inevitable of sequels? There’s still a disparity in graphical quality compared to its open-world contemporaries, still an over-abundance of explosive action for a licence that demands little of it, and still the awkward insertion of EA’s own storyline into the comprehensive existing fiction.

However, there are new ideas which could potentially lift it from the assembly line of doughy, malformed GTA replicas and stamp upon it a unique identity. A strategy element now organises the player’s progress – there’s a complex arrangement of business interests and rackets that the player must take over and run, arranging sabotage, intimidation and assassination missions from an abstracted map screen, while hiring, training and occasionally whacking family members. You no longer have to be directly involved at all times, instead electing to leave the dirty work to your goons.

Monopolising all rackets of a similar kind offers a significant perk – take over all the gun-running businesses, for example, and your men get body armour. The opposing AI can play the strategy game, too. Take three out of four businesses, and you’ll get heat from all the opposing families, hoping to prevent you establishing a monopoly.

There’s still a trace of the clunkiness between individual systems – and between licence and game – that marred its predecessor’s ambition. Losing a monopoly will see its perk instantly vanish; body armour will vaporise, leaving you significantly weakened, even if you’re in the middle of a firefight. Whacking a problematic underling simply entails checking a box which makes them susceptible to friendly fire – wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of The Godfather to be able to drive an insubordinate family member out to a quiet bridge and throw them off, concrete boots in place? Combat, too, looks fluid, but the flurry of devastating blows that pre-empts snapping a man’s arm or tossing him through some plate glass seems to be more Bourne than Blackhand. It’s perhaps a little jarring against the realist fiction – didn’t Captain McClusky break Michael Corleone’s jaw with a single, unglamorous blow?

To EA’s credit, though the sociopathic thuggishness of the GTA model will always be an uneasy fit for The Godfather, the sequel does attempt to redress this disconnect. If its employment of strategy can make the player feel like a Don in control of a crime empire, rather than a one-man army, then EA stands a chance of finally treating The Family with the respect it deserves.