As you already might have seen, I love Grand Theft Auto IV. I really loved the serious and story heavy part of the game, much because I really enjoyed the first Mafia game where there wasn’t really much room for crazy fun. Mafia II is out in a couple of weeks but a 15-minute demo is available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Of course, it’s just a demo-version but I was both very impressed and unfortunately not so impressed.

First of all – the look of this game is absolutely fantastic. With that said, it doesn’t always feel quit right. It’s not a fact of the engine being broken or simply some glitches. It’s the general feel. And also, it’s not all the time, but every now and then. Which is really weird and kind of unfortunate because the game really looses it’s momentum when this happens. I am going to try to explain what I mean.

The driving feels fine, especially on realistic mode. And even though the cars aren’t really taking as much damage as I would like them to do on realistic mode it’s fun to drive around. But the running and the running and the shooting feel kind of… dated? Even though the shotgun feels amazing and guys are flying all over the place when you are using it the way it should be used I’m constantly trying to avoid to shoot stuff. It’s kind of sad to admit but I think that the problem is the aiming and the lack of auto-aim. Rockstar’s Euphoria engine did a great combination and when they forced you to use free aiming it worked out just fine. That is not the case in Mafia II and it can very well be because of the way your character runs around. Also, the frame rate is way too low sometimes but that’s probably because of the demo.

But hey, as I said. It looks fantastic and some of the features (as the clothing shop, the car customization, your own house where you can interact with stuff) are very, very awesome and seriously, as we’ll be able to spend more then 15 minutes with the game we’ll probably get the feel of the game and it all will end up awesome.