A Waste of a Good Idea
Mafia 2 was released recently and I had been debating buying or renting it, for about a month, well thank fucking god I decided to rent it. There was so much potential they wasted in creating this. And since most of the gaming community cant sit still unless there's at least 12 bombs exploding and 50some dead guys scattered around let me put this in terms you get: Mafia 2 is: A Big Fucking Waste of Time.
While masquerading under the 'open world' or 'like gta, but' theme this game falls even shorter than GTA4 did on my list of expectations. The story is so bland and uninteresting in the places where they really could have brought some really neat ideas to life, and the characters lack any kind of drive. The world is one shade of ugh and the textures look blocky and plain. Now this is a cover shooter and those hold a special place in my heart where I ocasionally go to vomit. There was one good cover shooter and I'll let you guess what it was. No it was not Gears of War. But back to Mafia 2 (They should have called it something interesting, because a 2 is like a big pile of shit at the end of your name). The story follows Vito something or other, who you in no way care about because he has the personality of a dead rat and while his allies are a little more colorful they still come across as cardboard cutouts.
So enough with story and how bad it is, the gameplay is where the game falls face first off a 40' drop. The driving is boring, literally fucking boring, cars handle either way to easily or way too poorly, its like they couldnt decide between boring shit or just plain shit. The guns are pathetic (modern warfare syndrome here) and as such they detract any real challenge or adrenaline to the gunfights and it turns even the best encounters into bland cover shooting galleries. The missions are obviously scripted and most of them consist of: drive here, wait for guy, shoot guy, run away, get chased, shoot persuers. Rinse and repeat. There's nothing fun to Mafia 2 and it's disapointing. I never played the first Mafia so I'm not sure if it would have made an impact on this one but I should have to play the first one to ENJOY the second one, it's entertainment that's all it is, pure and simple, and thats the problem, it needs a deeper story, deeper characters and to add to the list of improvements they could have done: better graphics, better sound (though the soundtrack was amazing the quality wasnt), better gunplay. But if they had done that they would have made a good game and this is not a good game.
