Mafia II Message Board  

I was writing about this last night in an e-mail to a friend, so I'll just copy and paste what I wrote to Him:

So... Mafia 2... I'm a little torn on that one. It was a good game, though lacking in several important respects.

The Pros: The world is immensely detailed. The voice acting is great. Character models on the whole are pretty good with some being exceptional. The story felt authentic. NPC's have amusing an interesting dialogue to eavesdrop on. Language and violence was more mature than the first game. There are other positives which would be considered plot spoilers to speak of.

The Cons: A completely linear campaign with no side quests, or, if there is anything else to do in the game, the player is not made aware of it at all. The game saves at set points only and you can get knocked-back quite far if you get killed, which discourages doing anything outside of the story objectives. The game lasts about 10 hours (Steam stats tell me I finished in 9.1 hours, doing what I thought was taking my time), which is fairly dammed short considering that a good portion of that is consumed with driving. The game lacks a popular feature of the first game called Free Ride Mode, where the player could move freely about the city as a sandbox environment. The plot
and character development has some frustrating turns and shortcomings. Some rather impressive cinematics seen in game trailers never made it into the game. AI can't really be said to have improved since the first game, there is little that AI characters do better and even some basic stuff they do
worse. The game utilises nvidia PhysX which produces some nice debris and collision simulation, including cloth movement which adds natural sway and flow to coats, skirts and other clothing, however the performance hit and hardware requirements are quite absurd.

All of that could have been drastically mitigated by doubling the length of the game to 20 hours.

was it me or you never felt like being part of a family. you were just a soldier running around. Loved the game but guessing from the endings its not the ending yet.. so sequels might be around. Would be shame to see a crappy ending after 8 years of waiting... but tony angelo thing completely surprised me

Its too short if you use the trainer, but its longer when you have to actual do side missions to get cash etc.

I completed the game on HARD in 8 hours without ANY cheats. In my opinion the story is crap. It was too short, I felt like I never were a part of the Mafia family. And there's no country side But I guess there will be a sequel to Mafia 2 where you save Joe

[Edited by Skadoosh, 7/30/2019 8:37:51 AM]

8 hours? Some say its 15 hours. If you are correct - I cannot do anything but get disappointed and not buy this game.

@DABhand: Well the game has side-missions? My friend (CH friend) said that it does not have any. It is not a sandbox game and nor does it have Freeplay mode like it did in Mafia 1.

I loved the story and thought the amount of time it took to complete the game was reasonable, but there's so much more they could have added to the game (side quests, challenges, etc.) to broaden the gameplay experience.

Here's hoping whatever DLC they offer fattens that Mafia II cow up.

There is collecting 55 grand to do in a later missions, which requires doing side missions, etc.

I doubt the other guy beat the game in 8hrs on difficult with no trainer.. the AI is very clever and will flank you etc if you stay in one spot, gun shot hits are very hard you would have to get head shots in populated maps to survive, and they have to be perfect head shots.

Anyways, Mafia 1 was the same, the driving was more difficult as you had to deliver a few cars without a scratch, but it was done in chapters and there was only a few just like the 2nd. The map was obviously smaller than Mafia 2's map.

Like most games these days people will have to get used to the fact that they are designed around DLC packs, as developers and publishers recognise the money potential of these.

Well if you think about it, the 10h of play is at least 2h or more in scenes/video that progress us to next missions. I'm regretting buying this game, it isn't worth $60.