Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviewed it. Now I know I'll save my money for a long, long time.
I'll paste the most interesting paragraphs here, but make sure to read the entire review for additional thoughts.
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You're essentially a courier/chauffeur for the Family, and despite apparently rising in the ranks, your tasks never become any more significant. Even by the end of the game you're still struggling to do the most tedious of jobs, which inevitably involve driving a very long way, then driving back.
Vito's only in prison because of another tedious task, in which you're forced to drive to every gas station in the city in fifteen minutes, selling stamps. That's his big exciting crime: selling ration stamps. That's the scale in which Mafia II's story exists.
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To measure Mafia II against GTA IV is to measure Half-Life against STALKER. Neither has the same intentions, and neither should have to hit the same targets. Mafia II is more meaningfully measured against Mafia I, and it's here that it reveals how woefully empty it is.
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You can buy food to heal yourself, but you auto-heal and there's always free food in your apartment. You can buy guns, but the game gives you more than you'll ever be able to fire for nothing. You can upgrade your cars, but there's no need to at all. And gas? I drove one car a great deal, and it never got low on petrol, and if it had I'd just steal another one. The only establishments that serves a purpose are the clothes stores, which will let you disguise your appearance and shake police who may have a description of you. By, er, buying exactly the same clothes you were wearing before.
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Mafia II is devoid of emotion. Vito is a sociopath, and not by cunning writing, but because he's a hollow mannequin. His willingness to embrace the Mafia, and whichever grotesque tasks they demand of him, are met without conscience or consideration. When Vito finally does hesitate to do one illegal act toward the end, it's of so little consequence when compared with the horrors he's previously robotically performed, that you realise he was only ever a plastic pin stuck in an aimless plot.
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There's a couple of jokes that work, but in two hours of cutscenes that's really not enough. The rest is groups of people saying, "**** Marty, let's kill ***** Tony." (or whomever). It's such a collection of cliché that you could use it as a museum. When someone asks, "Hey, how'd you get in here?" the demoralising reply comes, "We followed the ***** yellow brick road." Imagine that dialogue endlessly repeated.
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However, the game does seem to have sourced a great deal of its content from the toilet. Quite literally. The story spends more time on topics of **** and vomit than anything else. One sequence in particular, involving disposing of a dead body, has drunken characters barfing everywhere, in what's presumably supposed to be crazy frat-movie antics. Another has Vito covered in human **** for an entire mission, to the scatological hilarity/disgust of everyone involved. I lost count of how many times it was implied that Vito was raped in the prison showers, but it sure must be a funny idea!
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Get shot in the back of the head, or have an idiot NPC driver crash you into a tree, and you'll have to not only repeat huge chunks of action, but also skip through cutscenes, get dressed, answer telephones, run down stairs, find cars… It's inexplicable.
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It's so maddening! This is an extraordinary game in many ways! An incredible city as wonderful decoration, with a really solid engine that's been lovingly crafted and executed. Superb gun fighting, amazing acting, and occasionally even some decent direction. The animations are remarkable, the damage modelling on the cars like nothing I've seen before.
But then it's let down by a nothing story, and the most peculiarly terrible ideas for missions. Why have such hateful checkpointing? What does it serve? Why make me pick out boxes of cigarettes (six times!) when I'm supposed to be playing a Mafia simulator? Why did they think those fisticuff fights were worth including once, let alone at least a dozen times? And why cast the player as a vacuous, uninteresting shop window dummy of crime?
What made Mafia: Lost Heaven special was Angelo, and his relationship with the world, the story, and the action. It was an enormously flawed game, with awful driving, overly-convoluted missions, and that race. But its heart was extraordinary. Mafia II has no heart at all. It's an emotionally dead, frequently boring game. The engine behind it desperately needs to be used for the excellent plot and thrilling action it deserved.
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