This one is quite an odd duck, in many many ways. It’s funny how many criticize open-world games from becoming too bloated, but Mafia 2 was criticized at launch for having NO bloat whatsoever. The open world is a backdrop in this game, not a playground, for the story of Vito, an up and coming mafia-boy.

So yeah this is a pretty classic mafia story, Vito comes from a poor family, resorts to crime, falls in with a bad crowd, goes to the war, comes back and gets right back in with the mafia. It checks off a lot of mafia tropes so it does feel a tad tired at this point.

Mafia 2 is also quite impressive on a number of fronts, especially for 2010. It exceless in place such as voice acting, world-building details and the game engine is also fairly impressive in certain spots, with the environmental destructibility or the detail it allows for. Some of the places you see or visit are insanely well crafted for what should be a throwaway-backdrop for a quick mission. If you like exploring finely crafted digital worlds, then Mafia 2 has something to offer.

Story and characters are the main draws of Mafia 2, since the gameplay is fairly standard driving and shooting. The driving some might find compelling since it can be set to “simulation” but i just kept it regular because i wasn’t here for the driving honestly. But you’re gonna do a LOT of it (no fast travel in this game), which can get tedious but the game is short enough that I didn’t get the chance to get annoyed, just a bit bored a few times. Classic music on the radio (which changes with time, i think?) helps with the driving and the overall atmosphere of the game.

What I found odd is that the story feels rushed/disjointed in places. Like other than Vito, Joe and to some extent, his prison papa Leo Galante or Henry (had to google their names), most nobody gets any significant screen time. At one point later in the game you have to whack a guy that fucked you over previously and it took me a minute to remember who he was since he appeared in like ONE cutscene or two at most. Same goes for Vito’s mother, you see her once in the intro, talk to her on the phone later, and that’s it. That’s the entirety of Vito’s interaction with his dear mother during Mafia 2. Same with his sister, they have like 2 interactions in the whole game. I think the game would have benefitted from a tighter cast that you spend more time with. Cause other than Joe and Vito I can’t really recall many others with detail, which you could say is fine since it’s THEIR story, but i still felt that a tighter more developed cast would’ve helped elevate the story overall.

That being said, Vito and Joe are fairly well developed, written and acted characters. I can’t say I LOVED them or cared about them too deeply, but their relationship was engaging and kept me at least interested till the end. Again, it helps that this game has no bloat, so it was a breezy 10ish hours or less i think (without any of the DLC). And I did find it interesting that this game is even less glamorous about the mafia lifestyle than usual. Sure you climb the ranks and “become somebody”, but I’d argue that most of the story is about Vito being given the short end of the stick. If you’re a pawn in the Mafia, then your fate is more or less sealed, a point hammered home in a more poignant way than I would’ve expected.

Honestly, I’ll take this approach to open-world games rather than the Ubisoft-bloat direction. That being said, I feel like there was room for SOME emergent gameplay since there’s some interesting systems that you never really have to interact with, like robbing gas stations. They’re not fully developed or anything, but there’s only ONE instance in the game where you are given an open-goal (make this amount of money) and allowed to go about it anyway you’d like. I feel there could have been a few more opportunities (at least 1 or 2) to let the player engage with the world a bit more freely without disrupting the story too much, give me a goal to make money, maybe some restrictions, and then let me do it however I can or want to.

Mafia 2 was for me, more than anything, an interesting anomaly to revisist. An open-world game that rejected many of the genre conventions of the time, trying to tell a fairly serious/mature story. I wouldn’t call it an amazing game, but it was a good time overall and worth the 9ish hours I put into it. I was looking for a captivating story in an interesting backdrop, and Mafia 2 provided. Not all the time, but it kept me going till the end, which most games do not. Worth mentioning that the end is somewhat abrupt (some called it a cliffhanger?) and predictable, but you know, the journey not the destination, yada yada.

Wow, i loved this game back in the day!
Mafia II had it all. The story takes you places and it has great pacing and characters.
The 40s and 50s are rendered in a superb way and omg the soundtrack... full of bangers and classics from that era, it is one of the largest collections of licensed songs ever assembled in a game i believe. It makes driving through Empire Bay a pleasure.
Great collection of cars, the city is beautiful and it feels alive. Peak Mafia game, there's more to say but i'll leave it at that, it was a beautiful experience and one of my favorites.

esse jogo é um espetáculo, a história te prende do início ao fim, de fato muito bem escrita e a IA surpreendentemente boa! infelizmente tiveram muitas mecânicas que envelheceram mal como os controles em gameplay e combate corpo a corpo, mas, nada que incomode muito. o fato de não ser legendado em português pode atrapalhar um pouco a experiência de quem não manja do inglês, pra quem compreende, terá uma excelente experiência! pra mim o melhor da trilogia.

obs: caso o fato do jogo não ser legendado te atrapalhe pode comprar a definitive edition que é literalmente um Remaster em HD, porém, infelizmente com alguns bugs que foram reportados.

Per Aspera Ad Astra!

Mafia II foca na história e abre mão do mundo aberto. De fato, é impossível jogar este game sem lembrar um pouquinho que seja de Grand Theft Auto mas a comparação é de fato mínima. Mafia não foca em dar liberdade ao jogador e sim em CONTAR A HISTÓRIA.

Isso até faz o mundo do jogo ser totalmente raso (Poucas pessoas na rua, poucos carros, poucas falas, o mundo é realmente meio vazio e morto) e pra ajudar o game não tem nenhuma missão secundária legal ou interessante (Na verdade nem tem mesmo).

Real dá pra sentir que a 2K focou totalmente na história do game. O jogo foca na vida de Vito Scaletta, um garoto vindo da Itália pros EUA que serviu na guerra e que por inúmeros motivos entra pro mundo errado.

A história é o ponto alto do jogo, a violência e esteriótipos fazem você se sentir em um filme sobre a mafia. Os personagens tem um desenvolvimento muito legal, o que contribui com o desenrolar da narrativa.

Vale elogiar a dirigibilidade e o combate com armas do jogo, que envelheceram muito bem. Em contra partida o combate corpo a corpo é repetitivo e sem emoção nenhuma

Algumas outras limitações como por exemplo o protagonista não pular e não nadar (Bizarro o jogo nem deixar você chegar com seu personagem na água) ofuscam a boa narrativa do jogo.

Joe Barbaro eu sou seu fã.

PRÓS:
- Narrativa excelente.
- Dirigibilidade envelheceu bem.

CONTRAS:
- Mundo aberto não existe.
- 0 conteúdo secundário.
- Limitações bobas.

I played this one back in the day, wasn't sure if I'd ever fully finished the story so wanted to give it another shot. The opening winter city is wonderful, one of my favourite environments from a video game. The music and the cars and the slushy snow and the lights at night - it's perfectly cozy. The environments and cars are my favourite aspect of the game, I don't think the story is amazing but it's good enough to keep you engaged, and little things like the music and the Playboy magazines to collect add to the fun.

Unfortunately I did run into a lot of glitches playing this on a modern PC - terrible framerate drops, sky flickering, and sudden crashes. I tried messing with a lot of settings up until I finished the game and nothing really solved it. also this game is RACIST. holy hell lmao. I feel like that deserves fair warning.

Overall a solid experience, I put about 20 hours into it this playthrough. Haven't checked out any of the DLC or worried much about the collectables, but I would like to go back through and try and find all the Playboys sometime.

My expectation going in was something L.A. Noire-ish, and that was more or less what I got. Given that LA Noire is a very similarly themed game in the not so populated genre of Americana-sandbox (specifically in the 50's in this case), and both games came out around the same time (9 or so months apart), this "review" will contain a lot of comparisons to it. I really like period games though, and this was a great one, so I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Gameplay-wise, where LA Noire is Phoenix Wright meets GTA/sandbox, Mafia II is cover-shooter meets GTA/sandbox. Personally, I prefer the Ace Attorney style of LA Noire, Mafia II takes itself as much more of an action game, and does it fairly well. There's a wide variety of guns which sound very good. Enemies aren't terribly smart by themselves, but where they spawn usually incorporates the level design in some way to make the best of their limited intelligence. You have a health bar that regens, but it regens kinda like in Wolfenstein: The New Order where the more you get hurt at one time, the less max health you'll be able to regen before healing again. On the topic of health regen speed, it differs a fair bit between difficulties.

I played through the story through on hard, then mucked around a ton on normal and easy to mop up collectibles and achievements, and the difference between difficulties is noticeable. Your health appears to regen much faster on lower difficulties, but I'm not 100% certain (sometimes it was very fast, other times fairly slow), but the biggest difference is how hard enemies hit. Enemies have exactly the same amount of health on every difficulty, but you just take WAY more damage on higher difficulties. You aren't invincible on easy mode, but after playing through the game on hard, I certainly felt like it. You can get wiped away REALLY quick by an unfortunate Tommy gun blast on hard mode, and the checkpoints are fairly unforgiving in the later chapters (especially the last one). Hard tends to be a fair challenge, even for someone who sucks at twin-stick shooting like me. Occasionally it runs into problems with the game design though.

There are certain sections where you're being fired upon by another vehicle's occupants. You're ALWAYS driving more or less, and this ain't Saints Row: You can't fire a gun while you drive a car, not even a pistol. Sometimes you're forced to drive on narrow stretches for a few seconds after the respawn point, and on hard mode it's just a gamble on whether you'll make it to the street alive. It's a total roll of the dice on whether the AI will get lucky and completely wreck your health bar before you can even try to take evasive action, and these cars are from the 50's, so they usually aren't terribly agile to begin with. Driving sections like this just clearly don't feel balanced for hard mode (ones I'm thinking of are in chapters 13 and 14, if I remember correctly). There's also one specific driving challenge that cuts the time REALLY close on hard mode. Considering that challenge requires on walking out of your building and getting a car that spawns, if you don't have the luck to have sports car in front of the bar that respawn, you're fucked (that's chapter 11). This leads to my issues with general game design.

For a cover shooter, this game REALLY needs a blind-fire mechanic. To fire at all from cover, you need to stick near your whole damn body out to then take aim and fire. Mostly in the last few chapters, the need for a safer way to fire at things becomes very clear as you have to take on groups of 5+ guys by yourself. The enemies even have an animation which is more or less blind firing, so I don't really see why the player character can't have some variation of that :/. Also, the aforementioned driving is a HUGE part of the game. Broken down, this game is story bits, driving, and action scenes interspersed. There's no LA Noire-style "make your partner drive" feature in this though, you gotta drive EVERYWHERE yourself, and damn do you gotta do it often. There's one chapter that's literally just driving and story stuff, not combat at all. The game really never makes much of an effort to make your destinations close together, relying on the narrative to dictate where the player needs to go. As such, if you have very little patience for driving in games, even with player conversations during, that's a big sticking point I can't ignore.

I didn't find the driving so bad actually, though. Compared to LA Noire, this game has a TON of period music on its radio stations. I really like the early rock, rhythm, and blues tracks of the 40's and 50's, so I always got some enjoyment of being in a car. If the music ain't your thing, it'll be a lot less bearable though.

I really enjoyed the story, personally. Where LA Noire was a fairly sanitized version of the 50's in terms of race relations, misogyny, derogatory language, this game doesn't shy away AT ALL. They never throw down an N-bomb, they throw around just about everything else. The main characters are self-centered, racist pigs, and their language gets that across very well. The main cast of Italian mobsters are voice acted very well, and really bring you into the atmosphere. The narrative, while it doesn't focus terribly well in every area that I'd want it to, is well written and engaging. I won't comment on my deeper complaints with the narrative choices (because that's both beyond the scope of this review, and very spoilery), but the mobster bits are of course the best part.

One final comment is that I didn't quite care for the collectibles in the game. Not the style of their hidden-ness, but of what they actually were. Spread all around the city are wanted posters of mobsters that you can collect, which are themselves fairly harmless. But spread throughout each mission are Playboy (actually branded) magazines to collect. When you get one, you get the "Playmate" poster of that issue. I'm not sure if it's the actual fold-out from that numbered issue, but the're real photos of real women, so it's a constant hunt for tits, more or less. While I'll admit they're attractive, I don't really feel it added anything to the experience other than just pandering to a male demographic. I also don't believe it harmed the game in any real way, but it's just something I wasn't entirely comfortable with in a game that, while it does have sexual themes, otherwise has no nudity and fairly tame gore. (For the record, I had a similar issue to how Splatterhouse essentially did this exact same thing with its collectibles).

Verdict: While the sloppy gameplay mistakes keep me from recommending it to everyone, any fan of history, Americana, or organized crime films will likely adore the story. I'd also recommend it to anyone who loved LA Noire's setting and wants more of that somewhat campy 50's atmosphere and storytelling.