Mafia II

[thugler]

Not sure if there was a thread for this already but I couldn't find it.

Right I got this yesterday, have been playing it. I was a huge fan of the first game, one of my all time favourites, and I played through it several times.

This one is complete garbage.

The graphics and music are fine, everything else is a mess, boring short missions packed with filler, awful boring combat, predictable plot, fairly decent voice acting, but with horrible horrible dialogue that sounds like it was written by a 12 year old. The cars and driving are fairly okay, but nothing special.

I must be more than halfway through and the missions are so slight and tutorialish. Absolutely no challenge or room for working out how to do a mission like in the first game. It's all signposted and everything is just a passage to another sequence of fighting/shooting/driving. Plus you don't seem to be able to shoot out of the car while you are driving.

Even the music, while pretty excellent, contains much more obvious choices than the first game.

[Father O`Blivion]

I loved the first one and have been waiting for this follow up for so long but every time they put back the release date I became ever more convinced that it wasn't going to be the game I was hoping for.
Reading the reviews it seems to be a rather flawed and bog standard third person shooter when everyone was expecting so much more from it.

I'm glad I didn't pre-order it now. I'm still going to buy it but I'll wait a few weeks until sales tail off and Asda drops the price to £25.

[Subtle Mocking]

I got it for just over £30 at Argos, but I'll probably just play it for a couple of hours then trade it for something more worthwhile. I'm thinking either Uncharted 2 or (if it's possible) £30 towards my pre-order of FIFA 11.

Either way this is going to be a game that's on every pre-owned shelf across the country soon.

[spanky]

Is that the standard Argos price or some kind of deal? I enjoyed the demo and plan to get it despite the wild variation in opinions I've read so far. The general overall opinion suggests it's a 6 or 7/10 kind of game, but so was the Saboteur and I absolutely loved that.

[Subtle Mocking]

They've bumped it back up to £35 now, but if you can hold off for a few weeks it'll be dirt cheap. The Saboteur didn't stay full price for long if I remember rightly.

[Neomod]

I played the demo and that was enough for me. I like the recreation of the era but the gameplay was shite. Pity really.

[Subtle Mocking]

Playing through this now and I'm beginning to really dislike it. It's all so bloody obvious and straightforward, and for a game this far into the generation, the screen tearing is fucking ridiculous.  Real shame because the setting is great, but even that Godfather game on PS2 was better.

[The Region Legion]

I tried replaying Mafia recently.

Got halfway through that first mission and just gave up on its piss poor driving controls. If ever there is a game that suffers from rose-tinted glasses, it's Mafia.

[Subtle Mocking]

Oh and another thing, this game is absolutely swamped with cutscenes. I want a game, not a 10 hour film.

[Ignatius_S]

I've been meaning to try the PC demo – been hearing very mixed things!

...I must be more than halfway through...

How much do you reckon you've played so far?

Oh and another thing, this game is absolutely swamped with cutscenes. I want a game, not a 10 hour film.

Quite a lot of reviews have been commenting upon this – not altogether negatively. One I read, did say it a little curious given that so many games are moving from this kind of narriative.

2k did talk about the amount of cutscenes that were going to be in the game a few times, I think. Although it was a bit vague, it also sounded that there were going to be a lot, so I'm not overly surprised to hear this. Then again, I seem to remember promises of longer playing time and maybe some features that didn't, err feature.

[Famous Mortimer]

It's got 74 on Metacritic, which for a computer game review is like a 25 for a film. Avoid, I reckon.

[Ignatius_S]

It's 80 for the PC, but I don't know if that really reflects a difference between the game on different formats!

Personally, I don't pay too much attention to the aggregate scores and rather look at the individual reviews.

[thugler]

Ignatious, I lustre played for maybe 4 hours or so. I've seen 3 time periods go by and raced through the ranks of the mafia without really doing anything. I don't think I'm looking at the first game through Rose tinted glasses; it wasn't perfect but there are some amazingly memorable bits. This has none. Every mission goes wrong. To the point that you just expect it everytime. Everything was better in the first game, I would say play that instead. I will finish this though. Just in case

[Ignatius_S]

That playing time isn't far off from what I expected from what I've read and you said.

Cheers for the feedback – I had been planning to try the original, particularly as it's a huge favourite of one of my mates, but as I had some other games to get through, thought I might as well wait for the sequel. The more I've been reading about the new one, the more I think I'll go for the first one – I'm going to give Mafia 2's demo a go and suspect I'll pick it up cheap (I'm working on the principle it can't be worse than The Godfather 2!).

[chand]

Playing this now and I'm still a bit undecided about it. I think all the basic mechanics of driving and shooting are fine, and the story is decent. It's a nicely realised world, a bit like Red Dead Redemption there seems to be things going on that may or may not pay off later.

It's strange though, it seems like it tried to learn from the GTA IV criticism and went the other way; where GTA IV was criticised for having far too many missions where you go to place and shoot some people up, Mafia II has left me wishing there was more of that and less...fannying about. There's lots and lots of tutorialising of everything early on and I seem to be spending an awful lot of time driving somewhere to talk to someone who tells me to go talk to someone else. When you've done your mission you drive home to end the day and then the next morning drive somewhere else. I've loaded crates onto a truck, I've stood on the back of a truck picking out different colour packs of cigarettes, I've driven an incredibly long distance to get to a hill to bury a body and then come back with nothing at all happening, I've wandered around a huge yard talking to dozens of characters waiting to find the one that will tell me which character to talk to, and I have even scrubbed toilets. There are segments where you drive somewhere to watch a cutscene and then drive somewhere else.

A few other annoyances: other cars make absolutely no attempt to get out of your way; if you're on the wrong side of the road for some reason, cars will just pootle along and ram into you. The police are unpredictable; earlier I rammed into a cop car from the front and nothing happened. Yet at other times I've been caught up in police chases for exceeding the speed limit when I've been trying to do a mission, which is annoying as fuck.

That said, I feel compelled to keep playing; I like the setting and I keep wanting to see what happens next, and I have enjoyed a number of the more eventful missions so far.

[El Unicornio, mang]

Having looked at some youtube vids it looks like something I'd like to play just to roam around a 50s America environment, even if the missions aren't up to much.

[Zetetic]

Only based on the demo, and the many reviews (arguably erroneously[nb]RPS' Wot I Think[/nb], in that it's not really trying to be the same) comparing very badly it GTA IV, it's not a fun environment to explore. Reasonably pretty, not much to do.

[Steve Lampkins]

Having looked at some youtube vids it looks like something I'd like to play just to roam around a 50s America environment, even if the missions aren't up to much.

The free ride mode in the original game was a lot of fun, yes.

[falafel]

I've been meaning to try the PC demo – been hearing very mixed things!
How much do you reckon you've played so far?
Quite a lot of reviews have been commenting upon this – not altogether negatively. One I read, did say it a little curious given that so many games are moving from this kind of narriative.

2k did talk about the amount of cutscenes that were going to be in the game a few times, I think. Although it was a bit vague, it also sounded that there were going to be a lot, so I'm not overly surprised to hear this. Then again, I seem to remember promises of longer playing time and maybe some features that didn't, err feature.

[spanky]

I'm enjoying it so far to be honest. It suffers when compared to true sandbox games, as it's basically a straight linear game but based within a sandbox environment so expecting a lot of extra-curricular activity would people disappointed, especially compared to a Saints Row.

The early part of the game where you

Spoiler alert

walk home at night while 'Let It Snow' plays in the background

[close]

is lovely, even though nothing actually happens.

[thugler]

There are several nice touches like that, but the actual missions remain boring the whole way through.

[chand]

The early part of the game where you

Spoiler alert

walk home at night while 'Let It Snow' plays in the background

[close]

is lovely, even though nothing actually happens.

I went into a shop right at the beginning and a women in there started a proper conversation with me, it seemed quite strange but I enjoyed it, helped set the scene. Just finding the missions a bit limiting; I understand the concept of having some slow missions which help flesh out the story, but for example there's a segment where you

Spoiler alert

get sent to prison. During this long, long segment which must have taken 45 minutes, you get involved in a couple of fistfights, clean up some toilets, wander around the prison yard talking to people, get told to wander around the gym talking to people, and generally spend the whole time being told to walk from point A to point B where a cutscene happens. I was expecting it to end with some kind of huge jailbreak set piece where you fight your way out through a riot, maybe a stealth section where you get to sneak out past the guards. Instead you do a couple of fights, talk to a bunch of people, and then eventually a cutscene happens where you get out.

[close]

[El Unicornio, mang]

Played the first few missions on this and am enjoying it so far. Like the fact that it starts off as a Medal of Honor type game in Sicily before heading to "New York". Like the snow and the scenery and the music, although there's something a bit empty about the place, feels like there should be more people/hot dog vendors/newspaper sellers, etc going on. I'm not that fussed about the missions being repetitive, they've always been pretty secondary for me in sandbox type games, it's the experience of exploring the surroundings that I like. I have a feeling I might get bored of this one quite quickly though....Also, it seems like the story of this is pretty much the same as GTAIV, fairly decent main character meeting up with overweight obnoxious bloke who is promising the moon on a stick if I just do some dirty jobs for him. Hope I get to meet some more interesting characters soon.