An interactive movie, in both the best and the worst senses of the word.
So, out it is. I played it, I finished it, I found every collectible. And it's only been one day since I bought it. It's not only that it is so good that you can't stop playing it though...
But I'm getting ahead of myself. You play as Vito Scaletta, a Sicilian immigrant who along with his friend Joe Barbaro start a journey towards becoming made men. This journey won't be easy though, as it involves much more than just using fancy suits. Does it?
Well, here's where the main issue with game kicks in. It is like a movie, of course, with fantastic, long cinematics with excellent voice acting and screenplay that push forward a solid plot. Regrettably, what you're doing between them isn't all that fun. You'll spend a third of the game driving around the gorgeously rendered Empire Bay, another third shooting around and another third watching said cinematics. While there is absolutely no problems with the control scheme while driving, and the combat is fantastic as well, you can't help the feeling of being tossed around from one point to the other to shoot people, then hop back in the car and drive to the next.
In so many words, the linearity of the game becomes strangling, with it constantly telling you what you have to do next. You could ignore it, of course, but that would just leave you with a big (not huge, mind you), beautiful city to wander around aimlessly. Sure, you can buy clothes and guns, but that will only last the ten seconds you take to notice there's only eight clothing options or so, and you can easily go through the game without buying a gun, since you'll find them all in the field. After you go out of your way for fifteen minutes to see what else is there, you'll go back to the story and objectives mode with a resignation sigh, and resume the driving and shooting around. Gone is the variety of the original where you had to race in a Grand Prix, walk your girl to her home or snipe a pesky senator. Here everything is "Drive from point A to B because we tell you to, then shoot everyone on Point B because we tell you to. Then go back home and sleep." It's also most unfortunate, because Vito takes all the wrong choices that you, the gamer, knowing better, would have avoided.
Once the story mode ends (with a rather coarse ending absolutely unfitting the quality of everything that was before), you can replay the game to find the Playboy mags in the levels (yah, nude girls. I know.) or the Wanted posters. And that's it. You finished it. The promise of DLC is not really enough at this point, so, other than the time in which it unfolds, Mafia II doesn't really offer anything we haven't seen in other games, done better to boot.
Graphically it's impressive though. The graphics are PhysX assisted, so you will gawk at the marvelous gunfights where everything shatters. And again. And again. And then it will wear off. That is, if you can run with it on, because it takes a 20+ FPS toll.
But yeah, it feels rather unsatisfying. I remember the extremely pleasant surprise when I finished the original Mafia of finding a game mode called Freeride Extreme. It was fantastic, with crazy tasks to do and fantastic cars to earn for doing them. Mafia II desperately needed that to breathe some more life into it. As it stands, the comparison between this and the original one is like comparing a night with Rosie Palms and her five sisters to a night with the Taylor Twins: both will get you off, but one will be a better memory than the other.
If you catch my drift.