Mafia II
2K Czech, Hangar 13/D3T (Definitive Edition)
Initial release: August 24, 2010 (Worldwide)
Platform: Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, PC
This review is based on Mafia II: Definitive Edition, which definitely had the cooler box art too.
 |
| images c/o Steam |
Mafia II is initially presented as an in-universe, but not storyline-related, sequel to the original game. Where the original game was set in the fictional midwestern city of Lost Heaven in the 1930s, the sequel spans from 1943 to 1951 and is set largely in an off-brand East Coast urban sprawl called Empire Bay, subtly implied to be a sort of Not York City, but given the topography I'd say it makes more sense to be somewhere in New Jersey. Or maybe both. Tonally it's quite different from the original, borrowing significantly more from modern mobster movies to give a darker, less romantic take on the life of a post-war gangster. Vito Scaletta is a down-and-out immigrant and petty criminal who gets shipped off to Europe in lieu of jail time; he comes back home in 1945 with a few scars and a whole lot of combat experience, and a determination to build a better life for himself than his father ever could. Alongside his best buddy Joe Barbaro, they raise hell across Empire Bay, looking to build a reputation and secure themselves a place in one of the many crime families that have divided the city up like a pie. No real "rise and fall" story this, Mafia II tries to emphasize the realities of a life of crime: every time Vito thinks he's getting somewhere, something bad happens: prison time, his house is burned down, a drug-dealing scheme goes horribly awry, and each time, everything Vito builds for himself is lost.
It's a decent story, but Mafia II was probably doomed to be an also-ran from the start. The original Mafia had cultivated a particular audience; the sequel seemed to target anybody but them. While neither game can reasonably be considered to be a Grand Theft Auto clone in the purest sense, Mafia II takes a lot more cues from its supposed rival series. But at that point, why not just play the still-relatively-new Grand Theft Auto IV? Mafia II, like the original, is divided up into chapters; these chapters largely use the city as a backdrop, so you won't really have much reason to go anywhere except your destination, unless you need guns, clothes, car repairs, food or even gas, something I needed exactly one time through my entire playthrough. Otherwise, your time will be spent going from one place to the next, where you might do anything from watch a cutscene to shoot a bunch of people. Initially set in the winter of early 1945 (complete with slippery roads if you have realistic driving turned on) there's a brief interlude about a third of the way in where Vito goes to prison for a while and has to fistfight a bunch of guys. Fastforward six years and he's dumped on the streets of Empire Bay, a free man once again, and the meat of the game is set in the bright days of spring and summer 1951.
The big problem with Mafia II is that there just isn't a lot to do. Your clothing options aren't terribly interesting, though if you have some of the DLC packs you get my favorite outfit: jeans, a t-shirt and a bright red leather jacket for that perfect 1950s high-school renegade look. Car options are more robust: you can store multiple cars, all of which can be customized in a variety of ways. If you need cash, you can sell cars at the docks or the junkyard. But the truth is, you won't really need much cash, especially since you lose everything twice anyway. You can't even use public transportation to get around town anymore; the original game let you take the train home if you needed to, but while there's a subway route marked on your map, and there are clear entrances to subway stations, they cannot be entered and no trains are ever seen. Big portions of the map feel incomplete, which is probably why you're rarely sent to locations out in those directions. There's also a severe layer of jank that not only persists into the remaster (creatively titled Definitive Edition) but is actually worse now. The whole thing feels like it was rushed to market to cash in on the 1950s nostalgia craze (and likely wanting to beat Fallout New Vegas to release, too.) While the DLC does add a lot of cut content back to the game, it's hampered by being really fucking shit, and two of them aren't even canon. The remaster does little to fix any of this, which is frustrating because there really is a decent game in Mafia II. You can see flashes of it in the story and some of the missions, but so much that made the original game interesting (if not necessarily good) has been stripped. The cops don't care about traffic violations; they barely even care about speeding anymore either. Combat is awful, the most generic cover shooter wash you ever played. The only thing the game is reasonably good at, gameplay-wise, is the driving. Everything else feels incomplete or unused. You can make phone calls, but they're useless unless the cops are after you. There's not a lot of variety in mission design. Even the story feels like it's got a lot of holes, as not once but twice the game cuts to monologue sequences with period music. This is most effective the first time around as "Let The Good Times Roll" plays over a montage of Joe and Vito, both recently inducted into the Falcone family, getting into antics like buying a car, buying a house and beating the shit out of a guy in an alley, but it loses its impact when the game uses it to gloss over the drug dealing storyline.
There's also a little bit of the intentionally edgy and shocking to the game. As a story set in 1950s gangland, it's probably not a surprise that the script has nearly 200 uses of the word "fuck" in it. More surprising is the heavy use of ethnic (and a few ableist) slurs, though they shy away from using the big N. Joe in particular is hard to take sympathetically as a character when he's so openly racist. On some level this can be excused by the time period it's set in and the kind of morality you can expect from mobsters, but it's hard not to feel like some of the depictions of ethnic minorities goes into stereotype territory. There's also the collectible Playboy centerfolds scattered around the map, which on the one hand feeds into the sleazy vibe (nevermind that Playboy's first issue released in 1953) but on the other hand just feels egregious and male-gazey, like the hand-painted "conquest cards" you could collect as rewards for sexual trysts in the original Witcher. I'm no prude, it just seems weird to make a whole collectathon out of it.
If there's one thing Mafia II does decently well, it's the 1950s vibe. Lots of period-appropriate (if often anachronistic) music, the outfits and cars are on point, and for all its frustrating sense of incompleteness, Empire Bay is an effective abstraction of a major 1950s East Coast city. Your car gets dirty the more you drive it; during the winter chapters, it accumulates snow. It all feels pretty authentic, even despite the numerous anachronisms; it's like a theme park version of the 1950s where half the attractions haven't been built yet.
I liked Mafia II, but maybe just this one time I'll hand it to the original game's snooty, die-hard fans: Mafia II is only so much wasted potential.
No comments:
Post a Comment