Mafia 2

Mafia came out way back in the day, at around about the same time GTA 3 came out. I loved it at the time. I found the realism really charming - I think I'm pretty much the only person who enjoyed driving under the speed limit, stopping at reds and then waiting for the cops to move out of eyeshot and gunning my engine. The plot was nicely mature as well. It's always impressive when a script manages to write about the Mafia and doesn't have the main characters come across as *total* dick heads.

So I just completed Mafia 2....

Hm.

On the one hand, I completed it, which is pretty impressive considering it's:
1) Set in the 1940's and 1950's
2) a third person cover shooter
3) an open world game

All three of those elements usually work severely against a game on their own, in my mind, when all three are present, I thought it would have spelt the kiss of death for the game.

I don't know if it was a sense of nostalgia about the first game or whether it was the fact that, once again, the main characters were generally quite likable and had decent motivation but I found myself liking it.

What did help was that it's not *exactly* an open world game. There aren't really any random subquests you can do. You can't get in a cop car and catch criminals or any of that other bollocks GTA and the like have you doing. This means that the focus of the game is very clearly on the main plot and the gameplay.

There are a few problems with it, though.

The big one is the AI. It's completely broken. Cops often couldn't see me stealing a car from across the street, enemies would occasionaly stand there and gaze lovingly at me whilst I shot their mates... At no point did I think that the enemies were in any way inteligent.

Then there's the problem of the realism... The murderous difficulty from the first game has been kept, as has the thing about keeping under the speed limit. Sadly, you can run red lights as much as you like. Most annoyingly, though, if you commit a crim in front of a cop, like killing someone, all the other cops magically know about it. In the first game, they had to get to a phone to call it in. Now, not being an expert in history, I don't know when cop cars were outfitted with radios but I suspect it wasn't the 50s. As a result, it feels pretty damn cheap.

Lastly, the plot is... a bit... meh. The broad plot is quite well done, there are a nice number of twisty bits but I felt the lack of any definite baddie... for most of the game my character was just bumbling through the game world with no real plan or ambition other than getting cash, cars and broads.

It was a fun game and given how little else is out at the moment it's probably worth an investment but... there are a good number of things wrong with it. If it'd come out six months ago, I'd have completely ignored it but it had the good fortune to come out in the anual june-november computer games drought.