Game Review: Mafia II - Definitive Edition

Game Review: Mafia II - Definitive Edition

Does the “definitive” release make Mafia II worth revisiting?

July 2020

Ross reviews the definitive edition of Mafia II. Is it worth picking up?

This wasn’t a game I had initially planned to a review but after a full playthrough and having seen the reactions from various critics I thought I’d throw in my views as someone who has never played a single game in this franchise before. I ended up purchasing this game on the recommendation of my cousin as, after finally seeing Goodfellas for the first time, he advised that this was a very good video game equivalent of the film and one of his all-time favourite games to boot. With the new definitive edition available for a pretty reasonable £25 on the Playstation Store, I figured it was worth a try to help distract me during the lockdown. I’ll leave out any major spoilers.

The start of the game is set in 1943 in Empire Bay (a fictional city on the East Coast of the USA) and you play as Sicilian immigrant Vito Scaletta who, after being caught robbing a jewellery store, is forced to join the army. In the first mission you fight Italian soldiers and it doubles up as a tutorial for the combat system which consists mainly of cover-based shooting. After this short segment, Vito receives an honourable discharge and sets off to find work with the local mob bosses, hoping to make a decent living for himself and his family.

The story is probably the best part of the game and was the thing that kept me going till the very end as I had to know how the storyline would be wrapped up. Like I said before, it’s very similar to movies like Goodfellas with you completing various tasks and missions to please the higher-ups within the Mafia while building a reputation and earning enough cash to set yourself up for life. Or so you think anyway. Of course, there are many twists and turns along the way, as you would expect in this kind of game, but I do wish there was more of an independent choice system as there are some decisions Vito makes later on in the game that I disagreed with and considered to be stupid, so I would have preferred the option to make my own choices.

The gameplay is very similar to the likes of Grand Theft Auto where you have the full run of a massive sandbox map and can essentially go wherever you want. The game world of Empire Bay is a gorgeous combination of a number of famous cities in the USA but as massive and beautiful as the world looks and feels, I do have some issues with the design. It’s only really used for the main story’s linear plot and it ends up feeling quite empty since there are no side quests whatsoever and only a few interactive buildings for buying clothes or polishing up your vehicle. This seems like the perfect game for multiple side quests as you could complete a myriad of tasks for different mafia bosses to make more money or to up your reputation and experience but unfortunately, the focus has been placed on the main plot more than anything else. 

I also have an issue with the way the law enforcement works in the sandbox. Unlike in games like Grand Theft Auto, the cops will chase after you and attempt to arrest you if you go even slightly over the speed limit, yet, after 5 hours of playing I realised that they won’t arrest you for running a red light, even if they can blatantly see you doing it. This logic is just a little screwed up. I get that they added this feature to add a bit more realism to the world but when it feels frustrating and slows some of the gameplay right down, it just ends up being annoying. That said, there is a cool little feature that lets you bribe the police so they leave you alone, which works, depending on your status in the mafia of course.

There are a few difficulty spikes here and there as well. I played through the game on the normal difficulty and while most missions were fair and challenging (only a few hits result in death so you have to be more tactical with the cover-based shooting mechanics) the game tends to put you in situations where death is almost guaranteed. There’s one particular segment that features you being attacked by a few goons in your home and you have to run around in your underwear with no access to weapons. To survive you need to quickly take down one of the goons with melee combat, grab their weapon and accurately dispatch the others with minimal cover for protection. A lot of player deaths follow, believe me. Alternatively, you can just do what I did and run around avoiding bullets until you find a car and drive away because screw this mission. Even in one of the earlier missions of the game, I found myself dying continuously whilst trying to escape an office building. Annoyingly the game’s checkpoint system kept putting me back to a point where it was near impossible to escape unscathed and it’s a flaw that could easily put new players off from continuing the game. Again I just got lucky by running away and stealing a car while avoiding gunfire. 

Looking at other reviews and videos about this remastering there seems to be a particular issue with weird glitches showing up now and again (like a car randomly appearing during a cutscene in an apartment) which would suggest that there wasn’t a lot of work put into this ‘remastering’. While nothing major happened to me, there were a couple of game-breaking bugs that forced me to restart the game, including one right after I completed the most boring mission in the game where you have to sell coupons to several gas stations within a strict time limit. The whole thing takes about 10 minutes as you drive slowly around the city to complete the mission, and when I had to force restart, I hadn’t hit the checkpoint for completing the mission and had to do the whole thing over again. It genuinely almost made me give up on the whole thing. 

Overall this definitive edition of Mafia II is a bit of a mixed bag but I enjoyed my time with it, for the most part. There are some fun missions, a great story and over 10 hours of gameplay to get lost in but there are several niggling frustrations that all add up and it’s a game I probably won’t pick up again unless I really have to for whatever reason. I would also not recommend this game to anyone that played the original game since the slight graphical improvements aren’t enough to offset the reported issues, glitches and framerate drops and the only additional content is the previously released DLC. So, if you’re trying Mafia II for the first time like I did, you’ll probably enjoy your playthrough. It’s also relatively cheap so still gets a recommendation from me, but only just, and for new players only.

Many thanks to Ross Donald for contributing this review. Ross has reviewed a number of games for The Head Scratcher (for more hit the button at the bottom of the page) and he regularly contributes to the excellent Glasgow-based rock and metal website Rock Will Eat Itself. Check them out at https://rockwilleatitself.blogspot.com.