It REALLY bugs me when people dismiss Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven and Mafia II because they were expecting it to be more like Grand Theft Auto.

I know in the past, even when the first game was still new, that it’s been compared to Grand Theft Auto. And I love GTA just as much! But if you’ve played either/both games, going into them with that mindset is gonna set you up for some bad dissapointment. It has it's similiarties and it has it's differences, but the differences become the most glaring. If you’ve played them you know, there's a lot of things different about Mafia and GTA. If I could make a little venn diagram here, I would. One of those more glaring differences would be the fact that Mafia is MUCH more linear that GTA. Does that make it a bad game? Absolutely not. In my personal opinion, not every game on the planet needs to be a sandbox/open-world game to be good, but that’s gonna be another story for another day.

But to anyone who is considering playing the games, just see them the way they are. There’s nothing awful about comparing a game to another game (even if stupid fanboy wars are usually the result of 'em), but if you base your reason for liking Mafia on whether or not it’ll be like GTA it’s really easy to miss what a gem it is on it’s own.

… though if you weren’t doing any of this and still didn’t like it (and you weren’t playing the really bad port of the first game), ehhhhhh. I wouldn’t fault you. Opinions is opinions is opinions.