The world of Mafia II is one of incredible detail, and attention to detail. The city of Empire Bay that plays host to your anti-social adventures is crammed with fine touches, like smoke billowing out of street vents and eye-catching lighting and colour, as well as overarching and complicated designs, like winding suburban paths, sprawling city streets, and filthy scrapyards.

Empire Bay is an enormous place, bustling with activity. The rush of 1940’s style cars over the roads and the movement of inhabitants across pavements combined with a cacophony of city sounds makes for a real ‘living, breathing’ city. If you want to get away from the hustle, take a trip into the greenery of the hills at night and spy vast vistas below you, with a constellation of towering skyscrapers and simple homes spilling into the starlit sky above.

Arriving back into Empire Bay at dawn via one of the immense, yawning bridges changes the complexion of the city again as the sun creeps over the brick and concrete of the world, stretching rays of light over the landscape ahead to transform buildings into intimidating silhouettes that sit imposingly in front of you, all set against an inviting pale orange sky – quite a contrast!

With all of the razzle-dazzle detail, visual excess and expansive scenery, however, Mafia II simply doesn’t deliver a game equal to its presentation, and instead contents itself with stringing players along on a linear story-based crime caper that, although delivered extremely well, requires far too much unnecessary and stringent work on the part of the player to fully enjoy.

What was I talking about again? Mafia II’s presentation? Magnificent. I could writes on and on about this or that moment I was struck by how well put together the world is, or how fantastic the voice acting is, or how surprised I was at the little sound effects details like car suspension squeaks. Over the course of the story, the seasons change, and the face of Empire Bay changes with it. Weather conditions change, and the world reflects the difference.

These details aren’t limited to just visual touches, however.

People react to those weather changes, too. It’s raining outside? People will be out with their umbrellas. People react to your vehicular antics, too. If you steal a car, or if you drive too fast or too recklessly, and you’re spotted by one of many police patrol cars, you’ll be chased down, forcing you to either lose the cops by driving even faster and more recklessly to escape them, or stop and get a ticket. The music of the game is also very well chosen, and bar a song or two here and there that may not be exactly period appropriate (Mafia II takes place during the 1940’s and 50’s), the tunes you’ll hear throughout the game easily get you into the theme.

All of this presentation detail comes with a price, however, which brings me to my first issue with Mafia II: The constant framerate slowdown. As soon as there’s just a little too much going on, graphically, the game’s framerate will noticeably drop to a little below comfort level. Still playable, but it does have a negative affect on button input, and when you’re involved in a high speed car chase and you speed around a corner only to be met with an open space and a slow framerate, controlling your car can become a little dodgy. This issue never clears up and dogs the entire game, beginning to end.

Speaking of beginning to end (did you see what I did there?), let’s rap a little about the story of Mafia II. You play as Vito Scaletta, a fellow who emigrated with his family from Italy to the USA in search of a better life, only there was no better life to be found. As he grew up, he became friends with Joe, an American, and to make a little money they turned to criminal activities. Before long, Vito was caught but instead of going to jail he was shipped off to fight in World War II.

It’s here where we first find out that Mafia II plays out pretty much like a standard third-person shooter, using the shoulder buttons to aim and shoot, the direction buttons to choose weapons (different directions for melee/grenades, rifles and shotguns), and face buttons for interaction and locking into cover for shoot outs. The cover system takes a little bit of getting used to as it’s not like other cover-based shooters where you’re able to simply ‘move out’ of cover – you’ll have to press the cover button to lock in and out of cover.

Miraculously, once you’re locked into cover, you’re able to move around the corner of that cover (like an ‘L’ shaped wall, for example) simply by holding another button and moving in the direction of that corner, unlike other games where this seems too complicated a task to complete.

Shooting is meaty and rewarding with a good mix of feedback and audio, and you’ll generally hit the targets you’re aiming at. Additionally, if you’re in the middle of a firefight and you’re running towards a cover point that’s currently occupied by an ally, that ally will simply move out of the way so you can take the cover. Very helpful if you don’t want your brain blasted out of your skull.

You can’t hide behind destructible objects for too long, however, because after a few shots, a wooden table that once provided ample cover will be shredded to pieces, while tall pillars will have chunks removed thanks to the firing of multiple rounds of hot ammunition. Later in the game, hiding behind sharks is similarly no good. Take my word for it.

Projectile weaponry can make way for brutal melee attacks, too, as Vito is no mug with his fists. Using a combination of three buttons (heavy and light attacks, plus a block button), you’ll easily be able to make quick work of anyone who challenges you to a round of fisticuffs.

Once the World War II period is over, you head on back home to the USA, and as a game player, you’re met with one of the most detailed and lively videogame scenes you’re likely to encounter – something similar to that Uncharted 2 sequence up in the mountain village, where you’re meeting and greeting all of the residents.

The locals will recognise you, speak to you, or just say ‘Hi,’ there are little sequences of events that play out as you walk through winding alleyways, newspaperman shout headlines out to the public (and speak to themselves in funny non sequiturs), and the first glimpse of the environment is astonishing – the amount of environment detail makes it feel as though you’re walking through a Hollywood or Broadway set. Not quite ‘real,’ but make-believe real. An odd but familiar feeling.

I relished this section of the game. I thought to myself, “Self, if this is how the rest of Mafia II plays out, this is going to be a top contender for game of the year.” I wanted to think that it had been possible for developer 2K Czech to keep up this kind of loving detail for all 10+ hours of the game, but I knew it wasn’t possible. I wanted to be proved wrong, though.

But I was right.

Once the story starts settling into its groove, 2K Czech simply grabs you by the controller and leads you along its designated path, very rarely allowing you the chance to stop, explore, and take part in extra curricular activities. Despite the scale and detail of the city of Empire Bay, this is no open-world or sandbox game. This is a linear, story-based singleplayer experience, through and through.

What am I talking about? I’ll provide some examples, but let’s get back to Vito and his return from World War II.

When you get back from the war, your old buddy Joe hooks you up with some more criminal activities to earn some quick cash, all in an effort to work your way into the big leagues and enter the world of organised crime, and the Mafia. Your long-suffering mother doesn’t approve of this, so you go to the local docks to try and get a ‘real’ job hauling crates. It doesn’t pay a lot of money, but it’s honest work. In the game, you’re met with a few dozen crates to carry to the back of a truck, one by one. So off I went, trying to carry each and every box. It’s not after around seven carried crates that, in-game, Vito automatically gives up and declares that he’d rather do dirty work than honest work.

I didn’t choose to stop working. Vito did.

This problem of taking the choice out of players’ hands crops up in other subtle ways throughout the story, too, as you’re working your way up the ranks of the criminal underworld and gaining the attention of the Mafia bosses, but unfortunately I can’t divulge lapses in (or complete lack of) player-controlled narrative due to possible spoilers.

Learning to drive in Mafia II is a curse, not because it’s an awful experience in and of itself, but because of the amount of time the game insists you spend doing it. While behind the wheel of a variety of 40’s and 50’s era cars (from sedans to sports cars) that all handle very realistically, you’ll spend more time travelling to and from missions than actually participating in them.

It all begins when you wake up in the morning and you get a call to take a trip to this or that location. Get up. Get your clothes on. Physically walk out of the building. Get in the car. Maybe drive to Joe’s place. Stop at Joe’s place. Get out the car. Physically walk up many flights of stairs to Joe’s apartment. Knock on the door. Get Joe. Physically walk down the stairs again. Get in the car. Drive to location. Complete objective. Drive back to Joe’s place. Drive back home. Physically walk into the building, up the stairs, into your apartment and ‘Use the Bed’ to go to sleep and end the mission.

This series of events plays out in various configurations for nearly every mission spread out over 15 chapters of the game. Sessions of driving can take up to 5 to 10 minutes, depending on where you are in the city. There is no auto-travel function. This constant travelling only exacerbates the feeling of linearity, as you’re always going where you’re meant to be going, rather than where you want to be going. There’s an entire city to explore, but no reason to explore it!

I realise that the developers put tons of effort into the creation of the city, but the best way to get players to see it would probably have been to include a few dozen side-missions, and maybe a dozen side-stories… or something! Currently, there is none of this. I saw a few pool tables in restaurants and bars in the game and thought, “Oh cool, maybe I can play some pool.” No. I could not ‘play some pool.’ Not even mini-games are present in Mafia II to change up the pace.

Instead, the pace changers are provided with the core missions themselves. During Mafia II, you’ll participate in stealthy sneaking missions, car chases, lots of brawls, and intense (and not so intense) shootouts. All of the missions are presented very well with setups that are more often than not interesting and important to the story… again, unfortunately I can’t go into specifics for fear of spoiling certain plot points.

It’s during these missions, however, that you’re introduced to the inconsistent and infuriating progress save system – a carry-over from the first Mafia game. Sometimes, the game will save like a champion, just at the right moment, so that if you die during a mission, it’ll plop you back at a good position and not too far back from where you died.

Other times, it won’t save at all, sending you all the way back to the beginning of the mission, some five to ten minutes of gameplay away. Five minutes can encase a lot of gaming, let me tell you, and when you have to do it all over again thanks to an inefficient save system, it’s more than a little frustrating.

Also, at times, one mission will link directly into another, and the objective of the new mission will be unclear, meaning you’ll have to look it up in the menu. Not a huge deal, but for me, it lead to a bit of aimless wandering at times.

I can hardly fault Mafia II on a technological level, and even on a moment-to-moment gameplay level, the game is very solid. In the text above, I’ve given it more than high praise in both departments, but it’s the overall experience that I find severely lacking, leaving me with a generally tame impression. Cutting out the need to physically travel everywhere, while beefing up the amount of side content (or including any side content) would have gone a long way to highlight the devastating amount of work that obviously went into making the city of Empire Bay, while providing gamers with more to do than follow a linear, beaten path.

The mobster-themed story is delivered excellently, with amazing voice-acting and visuals and all of the fine details and touches already mentioned, but in spite of the rich narrative, Mafia II feels poor and empty. Hopefully downloadable content will be able to enhance the game in the future, but right now I personally feel 2K Czech could have done better by taking advantage of Take-Two/2K Games’ willingness to postpone (and further postpone) a game’s release in order to improve it.

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