Paired with his more lavish, kitschy best friend Joe Barbaro, Vito is a fascinating leading man who shines in every scene. He's a skull-cracking villain, but like Tony Soprano, you feel bad for liking him anyway. He's neither an agent of chaos nor a back-against-the-wall vigilante. Vito is a complex main character, and I came away from this playthrough of the game with more thoughts on him than I did a decade ago. The writers expect you to keep up just like the HBO series' writers always did, and the authenticity is exciting to watch unfold. Things are left unsaid and meant to be inferred by the player, and the cast of organized criminals speak in their own lingo much of the time. Though it takes place decades before the seminal television series, Mafia 2 imitates the Sopranos in how comfortably it lets scenes draw out. That attribute hints at one of Mafia 2's best features: its restraint. Many of the missions ignore combat entirely - or for long stretches of time - and when they do involve violence, things are often settled with fistfights.

But it feels rule-breaking in the language of video games.įortunately, unless you spend your off-mission time shooting up the city like it's GTA, you'll likely spend less time using guns in a game called Mafia 2 than you'd expect. Popping out to shoot can make the reticule land somewhere unpredictable, and sometimes, you'll get killed behind cover anyway, which is honestly probably realistic. It does this most annoyingly when in cover. Overall, though, shooting is just not a highlight of the game given how it can sometimes let you down. In a way, I came to appreciate it a bit, as guns back then weren't the hyper-accurate instruments of murder they are today, and the game's physics are still morbidly delightful in the way enemies flop and drop when you've killed them. I can't recall how the mechanic felt upon its original release, but today, Mafia 2's gunplay is inaccurate and sometimes even unwieldy. Still, in 2020, shooting is one of the least enjoyable parts of Mafia 2. The game uses military combat as a tutorial for the third-person cover-based shooting players will partake in across the game's 12-hour campaign. Mafia 2 Definitive Edition Review: Disorganized Crimeĭespite taking place in the fictional New York City analog of Empire Bay, Mafia 2 smartly begins in Italy, where anti-hero Vito Scaletta is fighting in World War II. Thus I'm left with mixed emotions after having played through the Definitive Edition. Luckily, the best parts of Mafia 2 in 2010 remain great a decade later. Namely, if this really is the version by which we will define the crime drama, it will go down as something problematic for reasons old and new.

Mafia 2 definitive edition review