[360/PS3/PC] Mafia II Review

[DoctorFinger]

Mafia II Review

Title - Mafia II
Platforms - Xbox 360, Playstation 3 & Windows PCs.
Developer - 2K Czech
Publisher - 2K Games
ESRB Rating - M (Mature)
MSRP - $59.95
Editor - Michael "DoctorFinger" Chauvet
Playboy centerfolds found so far - 21 of 50.

What's Hot: Some nice callbacks to the “golden age of the American organized crime.” Nicely done story with some very solid voice acting.

What's Not: Open world game really isn’t that open. Rigidly linear. Occasionally frustrating checkpoint system. The game takes itself very seriously. Literally no side activities whatsoever. Squandered character opportunities. Pointless stealth missions. Repetitive radio stations.

One of the favorite pastimes of hardcore gamers is debating just what constitutes a genre in gaming. Does Modern Warfare qualify as an RPG? Is Brutal Legend an action game or a strategy game? But of all those arguments pale when compared to the one posed by 2K Games’ Mafia II: can a game still be considered open world when there’s nothing to do in that open world?

In Mafia II you play Vito Scaletta, Sicilian immigrant and hoodlum child of the Depression. After a childhood getting into trouble with your best buddy Joe Barbaro (voiced wonderfully by veteran actor Robert Costanzo) Vito is pushed to enlist in the US Army in the early 40s. The game’s tutorial actually takes place during the US invasion of Sicily during WWII. Eventually Vito gets his ticket home thanks to an injury and is soon embroiled in cliched but mostly entertaining tale of American organized crime in the fictional metropolis of Empire Bay.

The city of Empire Bay has a fair bit of personality and charm while never quite making itself feel unique. In a nice touch the early stages of the game are set in the middle of a snowy winter, and most of the missions therein take place at night. This produces some beautiful vistas to enjoy, and makes driving a little tricky at first. The time period gets a lot of play, with 40s and later 50s cars tooling down the streets of a city just starting to sprout suburbs.

Note the olde timeyness

Most of the missions are your normal open world fare. Get a car, drive to spot X, complete a task - usually either killing someone or picking up a package - and drive home to spot Y while evading pursuit. The few missions which deviate from this formula at all usually include a lame stealth sequence or a pointlessly random melee fight.

Outside of the main story missions, spread over 15 chapters, there is just about nothing else to do. Literally the only side mission available in the base game involves selling random cars to lots on opposite ends of the map for money. And I don’t mean specific models or anything. Grabbing any car of the street and selling it for a little extra scratch is the extent of the activities in the game. Too bad there really isn’t anything to spend the extra dough on. There are collectibles to find hidden across the city, including full on Playboy centerfolds from the glory days of the magazine. But since there’s no benefit to seeking all the widgets out, you won’t feel any real reason to trudge through the city hunting them down. Past the collectibles there are none of the ancillary activities you expect in an open world game like this. There are no races, no assassination missions, no purchasing property, no acquiring territories.

The story missions themselves are also a bit uneven, but most have their high points. Some of the missions are even exceptional, but you spend way too much time driving slowly around the same few sections of the city. You can buy new weapons, but the gun stores really don’t have anything you can’t get in spades during missions. Clothes stores dot the map, but there are only about a half dozen different outfits available for purchase. Changing clothes is also how you evade police pursuit so you’ll have most of the outfits in multiple colors soon enough.

Someone has to teach this diner a lesson

Controls are mostly solid. The vehicles at first seem to handle like boats, but that's how those 40s and 50s behemoths really handled. Even a “small” car back then weighed as much today’s SUVs. But if your only game driving experience consists of supercars then it may take a while to get used to these monsters, particularly the brakes. While driving you have the option to engage a “speed limiter” which won’t let you go over the speed limit. And you’ll generally want to keep that limiter on, because if a cop sees you speeding they will begin chasing you. It’s usually not so tough to shake the cops, but it can be a bit time consuming. On higher pursuit levels the cops are a little harder to shake, but it never becomes challenging.

The story of Vito’s rise through the ranks of the Mob is the best part of the game. Vito is played with enough street smarts that you know he can get the job done, yet with enough naivete that he believes in happy endings. You’ll experience pretty much every Mafia cliche in the book, but they’re all engrossing enough to keep you interested. There’s a point at which the story skips ahead several years, and with it comes an evolution of the setting. And by evolution I mean a few new cars on the streets and new songs on the radio. The city and it’s people don’t change in the years between 1945 and 1952. But the strength of the story is tempered by a total lack of humor and levity in the game. No one cracks a joke or a smile. Everything is serious as a heart attack, and that monotone keeps the story from being something special.

Italian stereotypes? Hey fuggetaboutit!

The visuals range from solid to very nice. The early part of the game where you run missions at night while snow falls makes for some very pleasant sights, but nothing spectacular. Empire Bay is meant to look like the prototypical American big city, but there’s nothing unique about it, although to 2K Czech’s credit each neighborhood manages a distinct look and feel. There are a few issues with the camera, mostly during gun battles. For reasons I could never quite discern, the camera would zoom in to the point that Vito’s body takes up fully half the screen. More a minor annoyance than a big deal, but an annoyance nonetheless. Much like the radio stations. At first listening to some olde timey tunes is a hoot, but then you realize there are only three stations and the songs get old quick. There are also large chunks of the city where you never have to go, rendering any work the developers put into them mostly moot.

More than anything Mafia II seems like a squandered opportunity. Take the characters for example. Vito, his partner in crime Joe and a couple of the Mafia bosses are fleshed out and that’s it. But there are a good dozen or more characters who show up for a minute or two then disappear in to the ether. You keep expecting the crazy gun dealer or the frazzled mob bartender or the creepy junkyard owner to show back up but it never happens. Likewise you keep expecting the flood of side activities to open up after this next mission, but they never do.

Score: (2.5 out of 5 Cogs)


Michael says, "There are some nice elements to the game, but they can’t save what is ultimately a crushingly rigid and joyless experience.”

* Review is based on Xbox 360 version of the game.

[MalReynolds]

i must be a sad individual because i had so much fun playing this game

[MosBen]

I really don't get the argument that there must be things to do. I don't complain that there's nothing to do in Halo other than the missions. I think sandbox games are great not because they offer all kinds of ancilary tasks to do, but because they allow the player to build memories. "That's the spot where I built a wall of cars and ran around killing people." "That's the spot where I had to kill that rival gang. Man, that was a bitch." Linear games take you from point A->B->C, and you never get a second chance to look back and remember the things you've done.

The criticisms of the plot seem reasonable enough. All I ask of a game is that I have fun playing it and that it not be excessively short unless it justifies the brevity with high quality. Have I played single player games that took 6-10 hours? Yeah, tons of them, and I'm sure I'll get more. Not every open world game needs or should be a 100+ hour romp where every inch of the world is packed with stuff to do.

[National Kato]

Originally Posted by MosBen

I really don't get the argument that there must be things to do. I don't complain that there's nothing to do in Halo other than the missions.

Maybe because there's more than just the missions to do in Halo? I mean, as long as we're comparing apples to oranges here. Multiplayer, Firefight, co-op, etc. Plenty to do.

I think sandbox games are great not because they offer all kinds of ancilary tasks to do, but because they allow the player to build memories. "That's the spot where I built a wall of cars and ran around killing people." "That's the spot where I had to kill that rival gang. Man, that was a bitch." Linear games take you from point A->B->C, and you never get a second chance to look back and remember the things you've done.

Mafia 2 was a very linear game, so it fits your latter definition of never having a chance to look back and remember what you've done. Open world games of old used to allow you to do the things you mention, but open world games these days at least give you a reason to do them. In Mafia 2, you can disregard your mission objectives and fuck around till the cows come home - except there's no reason to and no sense of accomplishment for doing so. Same reason I found no joy in goofing off in Crackdown 2, and even Crackdown 2 had some progress to be gained by fucking around, e.g. orbs.

Mafia 2 was fun, sure. I had fun with the very short amount of time it took me to play through it (15 missions, that's all there was). But it could've been so much more with just a few small changes. Those who take offense with the criticisms are taking it much too personally.

[muddi900]

You know another open-world game that had nothing to do...crackdown.

[Superman's Dead]

I agree with your points overall, Doc, I just put the emphasis elsewhere.

Also, Joe smiles, laughs, and cracks jokes literally all the time. His character had me laughing out loud repeatedly! Good ol' Joe. Hilarious, misogynistic, racist Joe.

[CptTripps]

Have not played it yet and will wait to judge for myself but; 2.5 seems pretty harsh. Can't wait to see if I feel the same way.

[DoctorFinger]

Here's my justification for the 2.5: there are a few really fun moments, but you have to slog through tons of filler and busy work just to get to them. It's a 10 hour game, but maybe 1.5-2 of those hours were entertaining.

[menage]

Originally Posted by muddi900

You know another open-world game that had nothing to do...crackdown.

I have to agree here, Crackdown seems the opposite of Mafia 2 though, no focus on why I'm shooting someone but just dicking around and collecting shit so you can collect more shit vs storybased missions in a world that needs dicking around.

[Dostoyevsky]

Mafia II is a great game that didn't get a fair shake here. I'm surprised I'm saying this, but ignore CoG's joyless review and try it for yourself, please. Where other games present the open world as a sandbox for a variety of mediocre tertiary activities, Mafia II's Empire Bay is merely the stage for an epic and compelling narrative that follows Vito's rise through the seedy underbelly of the Sicilian mafioso. No there isn't an extended cast of goofy secondary characters, and while the ones in play are painted in broad strokes, they are grounded in their game world, giving the missions that change their fates much more weight than the average GTA adventure. Linearity is often cited as a drawback in this game, but only to those expecting a city filled with mind-numbing mini-games. Funny how Half-Life 2 is never cited as linear, and while I'd be foolish to compare the narratives here, the analogy is apt. Finally, only an ADD-jaded gamer would call the driving sections "filler", as the beautifully rendered city, cars, music and NPC's add a lot to the character of the game overall. Warping from place to place is a fine gameplay conceit in most titles, but when presented with such a strong story, it would seem really out of place here.

2.5 CoG's is an insult to me and this game, so I insult you back, sir. Yo mama is fat.

This user has no personal knowledge of the reviewer or his/her mother and apologizes if said mama is indeed a fatty or has expired in some tear-jerking fashion