Mafia II Game Review

Review by IGN 7.0/10 Decent

Mafia II is upon us and ushering in a new era of wise guys and made men. If you’ve been waiting for this one, there is good news – the game is fun. Having shootouts in bars while bottles explode and glass flies, finding a mob hacking your friend to death, and going to brothels are all great times. Still, those moments aren’t the entire game, and the accompanying parts hurt the whole.

Mafia II casts you as Vito Scaletta, a young Italian who returns from World War II to find his mother and sister on the hook to a loan shark. Like any gangster in a gangster movie, Vito decides he doesn’t want a subpar life of the slums and goes down the organized crime route to make some cash. You’ll be with Vito as he whacks dudes, steals cars and tries on all sorts of snazzy outfits.

All of this is going on in Empire Bay, a New York-esque town packed with people, cops, cars and collectable Playboy magazines. Now, at first glance, Empire Bay looks like an open world – one teeming with missions and quests for you to take Vito on.

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Review by Eurogamer 4/10

The remarkable thing about Mafia II is not that it’s bad, but that it masks its awfulness so well. The game opens with striking visuals: the backdrop of Empire Bay (Mafia’s stand-in for New York City) is packed with World War II-era details, and the characters are authentic-looking, with a veneer of humanity. The nicely curated oldies soundtrack promises to immerse us in the culture and spirit of the period. Mafia II has the production values that players interpret as signs of quality. What comes next is cognitive dissonance.

Playing this Potemkin village of a game is an eerie experience. Mafia II puts up such a convincing facade that it’s hard to believe Empire Bay is, in fact, practically empty. Even after four hours of play, I told myself, “Once I get past these boring tutorial stages, the actual game is going to be great.” As I slogged through a mission to canvass Empire Bay’s local gas stations and sell off extra fuel stamps, the truth dawned on me: This was the actual game.

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Review by CVG

Illusion have taken seven years to develop this game. It started life being coded for the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2, before being transplanted into a completely new engine. That’s a development cycle from another era, one of patience and money rivers. So, what were you expecting?

Fans of the first game, were you expecting a new story of an innocent, drawn reluctantly into the world of organised crime? Mafia II isn’t such a kind creature. Sandbox fans, perhaps you were thinking that seven years in development would lead to an evolution of the first game, building on the original’s linear structure to make a free-roaming speakeasy? Nope – there’s no evolution there, either.

Mafia II is a faithful sequel. It’s an extremely linear driver and shooter. Does that description lack ambition? Haven’t our expectations been stretched beyond their elastic limit by a decade of “living, breathing cities”? Or can Mafia II be described as the driver genre’s Modern Warfare 2, in terms of outstanding linear set-pieces?

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Mafia II Video Review