One day I was craving some open world, GTA type game-play, but browsing trough different catalogs, I couldn’t find anything to suit my needs, and when I almost gave up on my cravings, I found this gem in my steam’s library. Also since Mafia 3 is out right now, it would be right time to dive into this title, and to remember what this franchise is all about.

The story takes place in fictional city named Empire Bay. You’re playing as young man called Vito Scalleta, whose just been back from action in World war II. As Vito returns, he’s starting to look for a job, but soon he realizes, that doing regular job, won’t be enough to support his family and fulfilling his material needs, so trough his old friend Joe, Vito gets in to doing some illegal activities, and starts his way up into world of underground crime scene. Story is split up in two parts, first one being winter of 1945 and second is summer of 1951. Each one has unique elements for current time period, like cars, clothes style, music and so on. Main plot it-self, is well written and has some great moments and characters, but nothing out of the box. If you watched some gangster or crime movies, TV shows or been in to other media of such kind, a lot of things you’ll find familiar. Same goes with characters some are quite interesting, funny and quite likable, while others are one-dimensional cliches. Story has some cool plot-twists and even couple a bit emotional moments. I personally really enjoyed it, and it’s one of the best stories in last-gen games of such type.

On ultra settings, Mafia II run quite well, however there were moments were frame-rate dropped below 30 and stayed that way for couple minutes for no particular reason. Trough my play-trough, game crushed a couple times and I also encounter couple game breaking bugs, so I had to restart some levels from begging. In the visual side of things, game looks great to this date, the draw distances are huge, lightning and environmental effects look great even 6 years later. Character models and animations look believable and lip-sinking also is done well, and environment has some angle of destructibility. Only thing to complain about, are textures, up close, a lot of them look quite ugly and low-res. I also enjoyed sound design, the voice acting is well done, cars and weapons sound great and there are enough ambient sounds to feel it more like a real city. Also you can not mention the license soundtrack, which is just awesome.

Last, but not least – the game-play. Well some say that this game is considered open-world. I would disagree. Mafia II is as open world, as Fable is RPG game. So yeah, you have this city, which is a descent size. But besides story, there's not much to do, you can visit gun shops or clothing stores, you can go to restaurants or bars to have some meals, and you have some side activities, like stealing cars to earn extra cash, and that’s where the open-world aspect ends. Since it’s a gangster themed game, you’ll be doing a lot of melee fighting and shooting. Melee aspect of the combat is done OK, but could be done better, all the melee-combat is just fist-fights and there are no melee weapons like baseball bat in first game. Shooting is pretty much cover-based, like it’s done in ''Gears of war'' or ''Spec-ops - The line'' and so on. It works great, weapons handle better than first game, and there are a lot more of them. Also the weapon management is improved. There are different types of pistols, rifles, sub-machines guns and explosives to choose. Only thing I didn’t like about shooting, is that it’s removed while driving, you’ll sometimes have someone in your car who will handle it, but you can’t do it yourself. And that brings me up to the last major element – cars. Cars in this game are still a bit clunky and sluggish to drive. But you can tune them up so they become faster and more easier to handle, also you can tune their appearance, and as you enter in to early 50’s the cars get better in every way. This game makes you focus on more “Drive safely” approach. Because police will chase you for speeding or hitting other cars. So quite often you’ll be driving by the rules, not to screw up the mission progress.

So to sum it up, game has some cool story, but it might be better and maybe element of choice could make it even more interesting. Gun-play and combat in general is done well and really improved over to the previous title. Car handling is more realistic, and makes you remember that your driving cars, from more than half-century ago. Game looks great to this date, but has some technical issues, that might not become pleasant. Overall the game is major improvement over first game, but it would be nice, if some game-play elements were left from first title. So yeah game is good, but some things could be done better. 9/10.

Thanks for reading.