REVIEW: “Mafia 2,” nothing new
“Mafia 2” is out in stores, and if you’ve been waiting for this one, there is good news as well as bad news. The good news is: the game is fun. The bad news: it is nothing special.
Having shootouts in bars, finding a mobster dismembering your friend, and going to brothels to try your luck with the ladies are all great times. But, the game is definitely lacking in areas and feels repetitive.
Mafia 2 casts you as Vito Scaletta, a young Italian who returns from WWII to find his mother and sister owe money to a loan shark. Vito decides he does not want a sub-par life in the slums and goes down the organized crime route to make ends meet. You will be with Vito as he whacks dudes, steals cars, tries on new outfits, and turns into a bona fide gangster .
All of this is going on in Empire Bay, a New York-esque town packed with all the things that makes New York the way it is. Empire Bay looks like an open world map; one with missions and quests for you to accomplish with Vito. It isn’t. You’ll have one mission at one time and it is always one that moves the main story forward.
Mafia 2 is a game built around the main storyline and doesn’t give you freedom to do much else. Is this a terrible thing? Of course not, it’s just something worth pointing out, because I don’t want you thinking it’s like the Grand Theft Auto series.
It’s a shame, because I felt they could have made a much better game if they went in the open-world direction. But don’t get me wrong, I liked the storyline and what it had to offer. I just wish I could affect it more and put my own personal touch on it.
The snag is, the story is the most entertaining part of the game. I felt like everything between the cut-scenes was just stiff and monotonous, made to get me to the next one.
The mechanics of Mafia 2 are pretty much those of a basic third-person shooter. You have a bunch of guns and you kill everybody so you can move on. Mafia 2 demands that you crouch behind objects, pop out and shoot, and then go back to cover so you can regain health.
The cover system is pretty smooth, which is nice. Most of the time you just move forward gunning down anything in the way. The fight scenes feel stiff, the aiming is unnatural and I never have a good time waiting for my health to regenerate. The gun-play isn’t terrible, its just not that interesting.
Mafia 2 also struggles with pacing the storyline. There are great moments, like when you’re driving a dead body in your car to go hide. But there are mundane parts where you watch Vito pick up the phone and stare at the wall like a robot.
You will finish a mission on one side of the town, have to drive your car all the way home to park it, walk inside your apartment building, walk to your bed, and go to sleep. Nothing essential happens in this time at all.
Police in Mafia 2 can be interestingly aggressive and annoyingly painstaking. The game cops will report your license plate or clothing description, and then it’s up to you to switch your license plate or outfit. Other times they’ll be stopping you for speeding or fender benders, time-consuming stops that don’t affect the storyline.
Mafia 2 is an interesting mobster tale with some great voice-acting and cool cut-scenes, but be prepared for a pretty standard third-person shooter in the gameplay department. The “take cover, kill everyone, do it again” mechanic bored me, but it didn’t let me down either.
Overall it was an entertaining game that I didn’t expect much of, and got what I asked for. It doesn’t take very long to beat and there are not any special features to the game that would make you play it after you beat the storyline, so I would recommend renting the game rather than buy it.
Positives- Cutscenes, voice acting, and standard gangster fun.
Negatives- Wasted travel time, annoying cops, and mundane fight scenes.
Don’t like my review? Send me a note at
billy.harlow@aggiemail.usu.edu