Mafia II

I have to admit I was really looking forward to Mafia II. I was one of the crazy people that played the original from start to finish on the PC 8 years ago, and the demo had incited more hope. However all of that went out the window the second the game starts.

Now I really enjoyed the original Mafia, it was a pretty good third person shooter in an open world that capitalized on the recent popularity of GTA3. I had a lot of fun memories of it, sure it had it's problems but you would think with 8 years to to think about it, and nearly 3 years of dev time they would of fixed these problems. Nope......

The story opens up fallowing the story of Vito, a young immigrant who grew up on the poor side of empire bay and with the help of his oldest friend Joey is determined to make a name for himself. And so starts the first problem with the game, if you have seen a mob movie in the last 25 years, cut out the romance from those flicks and you have the story of Mafia 2 more or less. Its a fairly straightforward story with generic characters. Maybe its just me but with a few exceptions I had a rough time remembering who I was supposed to kill/protect, and why I should care about them. It hits all the notes of a Scorsese movie, but without strong characters to drive the plot points it all just falls flat.

Now onto the biggest problem of Mafia II, game play. Very little of this game feels modern from the one size fits all cross hair to the cover system that still allows you to get hit even when your enemies cant see you, the ladder being the bigger problem. Now I understand why the developer would chose to make the bullet damage fairly realistic (it only takes 2 or 3 hits to send Vito crumpling to the ground in a rag doll heap) its a game play choice, they could of gone right or left and they chose left. Where there choice becomes a real issue however is when you realize that the enemy AI has near perfect accuracy at almost any distance with pretty much any gun. I can't count the number of times was killed while driving away at high speed by someone 3 or four car lengths behind me. And when I say killed I mean the chasers shot me threw the car window at high speed on a busy street. Worse yet all of the weapon are fairly indistinguishable once you get them, almost all of the guns feel exactly the same. The Colt 1911 takes just as many shots to kill someone with as the 38. revolver. The grenades and Molotov's are hard enough to aim that I found it easier to just shoot everyone and save myself the frustration. The only weapon that is worth switching to is the magnum, it is pretty much always a one shot kill weapon and with the aforementioned aim the computer displays is your best bet for most of the game.

The enemy AI jumps from very challenging to a joke. Sometimes the enemy's take advantage of there overwhelming numbers and constantly push you to shoot back or move, other times they take cover behind boarding that you already destroyed or hide with there heads in plain sight. And on multiple occasions I ran into everyone's favorite gotcha AI. In the middle of a particularly long and nasty gunfight you have to walk up a very narrow stairway to proceed, when you reach about the 3rd step a grenade comes flying towards you and explodes all of 2 seconds later forcing you all the way back to the start of the mission. Even the second time I tried when I knew it was coming I was still barely able to get away.

The "open world" that this game totes feels very bland and generic. There is little to do other then drive from point X to pick up Y for story mission Z. Ask anyone what the most appealing part of an open world game is and they will tell you freedom, the ability to go anywhere you want and in most cases break the game, this however is also not in the cards for Mafia II. On at least 3 occasions during my time with the game I was stripped of all the guns I spent time collect and all of my cash leaving me starting over from square one. It all feels like a cheap attempt to pad out the games playtime (12 hours for me) which is farther extending by forcing you to drive at 40MPh unless you want the police to chase you down.

Now I feel I should preface this next sentence by pointing out that I was playing this game on a standered def TV, shocking I know but there are those of us that still do. And on that TV this game is can be downright ugly the lines on cars blur together and look like a poorly compressed video. The character models looks fairly lifelike, until they move or talk at which point they look like stiff dolls.

The only real saving grace for most of the game is the sound design, the guns (especially the magnum and tommy gun) all have a real pop to them, the cars all sound believably loud when revving up and most of the voice actors do a fairly good job, very stereotypical and slightly racist but fitting of the setting and characters.

All in all Mafia II feels like a half done game, the open world is sparse and unimaginative. The shooting feels like it was designed by someone who never heard of let alone played Gears of War. Its not necessarily a bad game just a very dated one If it came out pre-vice city I am sure I would have a different opinion, but its 2010 times have changed and this franchise has been left in the dust.