User Review : Mafia 2

Mafia 2 PC Review: An Imperfect Masterpiece

Mafia 2 was released in August last year for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. I was impressed by what I saw of the title before release, but could not quite justify purchasing the game given all the others I had to play already. I finally picked the game up during a recent Steam sale for next to nothing and having now played it I wish I had done so earlier.

You play as Vito Scaletta, a remarkably likeable lead character for an open-world game. Often games in this genre fail to create captivating characters and dialogue, but this is certainly not true of Mafia 2. Along with Vito, your main buddy in the game Joe Barbaro is superbly rich characters which not only makes him likeable, it makes him believable (as are many of the supporting characters).

The story is equally as impressive for an open-world game. One of the complaints levelled at the game was its lack of side missions and the like. While I enjoy the diversion that side missions create in classics like GTA: San Andreas, there is no need for a diversion here as the story keeps pulling you through, and not having to worry about side missions has allowed developer 2K Czech to really focus on the pacing and flow of the story.

The missions don't have incredible variety at least in terms of the gameplay, with a significant portion of them leading to a standard gun fight. Lucky then that the gunplay and indeed the hand-to-hand combat systems are so fluid that you will rarely find fault with them. The cover system is much more refined than in other similar games, indeed it is probably the only cover system I've used that hasn't gotten me killed on several occasions.

One downside to the fire fights is that they are super scripted with very little to no variation. Sure, enemies will move from cover into a better hiding spot if you flank them, but generally there is no variation in the way a battle plays out which can make retrying from checkpoints a little tedious.

Checkpointing in some missions is very harsh indeed. In the second last chapter for example there is a prolonged fire fight which moves from the docks into a warehouse. Normally, you would expect a checkpoint to be placed at the entrance to the warehouse, but unfortunately not, indeed there is no checkpoint until the mission is over and you retrieve the money you are after. This may not be a huge issue on lower difficulties, but try playing through this chapter on hardest difficulty and then get back to me.

The games AI is fairly good for both enemies and friendlies. Like I said earlier, enemies will move from cover to cover to get a better shot at you, and they also coordinate their attacks (i.e. one fires while one reloads behind cover or changes position). However it is not without fault. As in usually the case in these sort of games, doing something illegal will result in the cops pursuing you. Unlike other games however, even once you evade the cops if the crime you committed is serious enough you or the car you're driving will still be wanted, requiring a change of outfit or vehicle to remove the wanted level (you can also respray your car or change the number plate which you can even customise).

No issue so far, that's all fair enough. The issue is that the police AI is often somewhat bad. For example, you can be going 100 mile/hour in the opposite direction to a police car and if you are wanted he will recognise it's you straight away. Yeah, good luck. On the other side of the coin though, it is at times ridiculously easy to evade the cops. In Mafia 2, you don't have to clear a zone like in GTA to lower your wanted stars, you simply have to get out of site. What this means is that you can be drving in an open area with no cover and the cops after you, and all you have to do to evade them is get out of the car and go into cover behind the car so that they can't see you. Good AI would come and look around the side of the car where it saw you duck down, but not here.

There are also still a number of major glitches present in the game even now 10 months on from release. On several occasions after leaving cover my gun would automatically fire clip after clip, or on other occasions my character would just randomly start walking in one direction completely taking away my control and forcing me to restart from a checkpoint. These don't even compare to the biggest issue though. (Slight spoilers contained in the rest of the paragraph) In Chapter 14, your buddy Joe gets kidnapped and you have to go and help him out. It turns out he is at the top of a rather tall building. After getting caught yourself, you end up escaping but still have to fight your way down to ground level. Of course, Joe has been beaten up a bit and so you have to do all of the shooting and indeed lead the way. Now I didn't know this while playing but Joe is supposed to follow you. For me though he didn't, and instead was stuck right at the top walking into the wall beside a staircase, the age old pathfinding fail strikes again. Annoyingly, by the time I had fought my way down to ground level and then gone back up to find him his AI had given up and gone to sleep, meaning that I had to either restart the entire chapter or the option I took which was to push him down 6 or so levels of the building by walking into him. This is apparently an isolated glitch, but one that was reported in August 2010 and should have been fixed by now.

Besides the shooting heavy missions, there are also an array of vehicle oriented ones. These can be tricky, particularly ones that require you to get somewhere in a limited space of time. The cops are much more heavy handed here than in other games, although besides a few issues I don't think unfairly, just harsh enough to make you think twice about drifting around a corner and wiping out a half-dozen pedestrians.

You have a money balance in the game but for the most part it is only used for missions which require some investment (as in you don't get to choose whether to pay or not) and the occasional vehicle repair. You can earn money by crushing cars or robbing stores (quick hint, don't try and hold up the weapons store with anything other than a shotgun), and spend money on food, clothes, weapons, petrol and car modifications/repairs. However, I always managed to scavenge enough ammo from dead foes, eliminating the need to purchase any, and health (mostly) regenerates so there is no need to buy food.

Graphics on PC are fantastic, even on medium settings with reduced effects (I played this on my laptop rather than my gaming PC). Characters are highly detailed (although characters models are re-used fair too often, especially the Chinese), as are vehicles and scenery. Animation is strong during cut scenes and even for the most part in gameplay, but lip-syncing can get a bit wacky at times. Performance is fairly stable, with the frame rate not varying much other than in AI/destruction heavy battles. That's one thing I should mention, the game uses PhysX, which allows for things like barricades, window panes, bollards, posts, walls etc. to be dynamically damaged in real time. It really looks fantastic and adds to the immersion when the wooden post above your head gets splintered into a thousand pieces by enemy fire.

In conclusion, Mafia 2 does a lot right in terms of presentation, characters and story. The game world is just small enough that you can get familiar with it and just big enough that it doesn't get boring. Gunplay and fist-fighting is class leading, with a refined cover system that does exactly what it's supposed to. The games length is moderate at around 12 hours on medium difficult which in many respects is a positive side as 2K Czech have not included any tedious missions to extend play time and instead you get a solid experience all the way through. The few bugs that remain, however major, were not enough to stop me from thoroughly enjoying my time with the game. With the game now at bargain prices, there is no excuse for any gamer not to have this game in his/her collection.