Virtual 100 – Game 19
Worst. Mobsters. Ever.
If you ever needed three words to summarize an entire game, there you go. It’s comical, almost to the point of parody, how predictably bad these guys are at their job. The only thing they’re good at is not dying. And even that became tricky at times.
But seriously. Don’t rely on these guys to do anything. At all.
I would go into detail about the story of Mafia II Definitive Edition, but all it would do is either confuse you or just make you shake your head. It doesn’t make any sense. The original Mafia game had a story that centered around the main character basically turning informant for the FBI in exchange for protection. So his story is told via a series of flashbacks, narrated quite well and explaining things plainly. Mafia II kinda does that, but it’s inconsistent. Sometimes Vito will narrate like he’s talking to someone or writing a letter, but most other times it seems as though everything is playing out in the present, so when he starts narrating it’s like, who’s he talking to?
The story itself is non-sensical. Not that it doesn’t make sense per se, but it seems like it was written by someone who either didn’t understand how actual Mafias operated, or by someone who just didn’t bother to do the research. Like it was written by someone who watched The Godfather and thought, “this should be a video game!” (note: there actually is a Godfather videogame). It’s like glorified fanfiction. You Lord of the Rings fans know what I’m talking about.
I’m not an expert on organized crime, but I do know photography. And whenever I see someone in a tv show or a movie depicting a photographer, I can’t help but spot all the things they’re doing wrong. I imagine this would be a similar situation for any history buff or mob afficionado. Especially if I can see it myself.
Personally, I can’t help but feel like these families may have been run a little bit tighter than this. Vito and Joe bumble around town for over a decade, running side schemes and mass murdering and getting into fights with other gangs and nobody knows a thing? I don’t buy it.
On top of that, they fail miserably at literally every “sure thing” job they run. It got to a point where it was laughable. They can’t even sell cigarettes out of the back of a truck without it going awry. Every time they get a big score, they end up losing the money for one reason or another, or the “big score” turns out to be not-so-big, and they’re left worse off than before. I’m not sure what the story was intended to be.
The original Mafia was about a guy getting into the mob, getting made, living the good mobster life, and then when the shit starts hitting the fan, he wants out. I get that. He enjoyed it for a while and then things started to fall apart, he was like ‘screw this.’
Joe and Vito never really ‘make it.’ It takes about half the game for them to get inducted into the Family, at which point everything is supposed to be easy-peasy. The thug life. But instead, they’re still doing side jobs and trying to make extra money. I thought that was the point of getting Made? You’re on the mob payroll now. Go wear your suits and be a badass.
And it happens at first. Vito goes from sleeping on a couch to having his own home. Driving a nice car. We get a whole music montage of him and Joe living it up. But then he gets in a fight with his sister’s Irish husband, and they come and burn his house down, which has all his cash in it. So he’s… broke again? Surely being in the Family comes with some kind of insurance? Somebody to spot him a few bucks? Somebody to back him up? Send a few guys to tell them “you don’t fuck with the mob?” No? Well, okay then.
And it happens like this the entire game. One thing or another. I get it, there’s a very well-worn and trustworthy story arc to having someone go from nothing to something and then to nothing again, but it happens like, five times in the game. Vito is always broke. Which completely goes against the entire reason they wanted to be in the mob in the first place. They are the most un-mobster mobsters in history.
Not only that, but they are picked on by pretty much everyone in the city. Being in the mob apparently doesn’t mean a damn thing. The dock workers don’t care if he’s in the mob. The Irish don’t care that he’s in the mob. The Chinese don’t care if he’s in the mob. So what’s the point of being in the mob if nobody gives a shit?
Everything in the game is kinda pointless. I don’t know any other way to say it. Like I said, there’s an entire side story with Vito’s sister. She gets married, the dude gets drunk and cheats on her, beats her, etc. Vito gets mad, goes to the guy’s apartment and beats him up. His sister gets mad at his intervention and tells her to stay away from them. Then the guy gets his buddies together and they go burn Vito’s house down and try to murder him. Does his sister care? Does she get mad at her husband for trying to kill her brother? We don’t know, because the game doesn’t care to tell us. It’s all a big mcguffin to get Vito down on his luck yet again so he has to do the thing that pushes the story forward.
Well I guess I’ve bitched enough about the story. Let’s bitch about something else!
Playing the game was exhausting. Living Vito’s life was exhausting. Having to drive literally everywhere was fucking exhausting. Why? Why could there not be at least one or two cutscenes where they drive there themselves? Why did the game have to make me drive all the way across town literally every single time? After the first five times I’ve driven to The Falcon, couldn’t the game do me a solid and just, I dunno, do a fade-out and fade-in? Or a “later that evening?”
I mean, they do show passage of time, but it usually fades in on Vito waking up in his apartment with the phone ringing. It’s someone telling him to meet them somewhere, so guess what you get to do? Get in the fuckin’ car, and drive across fuckin’ town. It’s never within walking distance. It’s never “hey meet me across the street.” No, it’s always across town. And when you get over there, the next objective is usually— you guessed it— all the way across town!
I got so gawt-dammed tired of driving all the way across town every damn time. It was easily the worst part of the game. And it stretched what I’m pretty sure was a five hour game into ten-plus hours. I know that’s the point. It’s padding. I get it. But holy shit.
I will give them credit for making a nice-looking city. But you never get to experience it because there’s never any reason to. Like I said, every objective is so far away that walking isn’t practical. So it’s a well-crafted city that you never pay attention to because you’re too busy not slamming into other cars that are stopped on the road for virtually no reason.
There is a speed limiter for driving. You can activate it, and no matter how hard you press the gas, you will not break the speed limit. You can deactivate it, and do 100 mph in a 2-ton Studebaker that handles like a tank and can’t brake for shit at that speed, which will send you careening off a road and slamming into other vehicles and possibly even killing yourself. Because you can absolutely kill yourself by hitting something. And of course drawing heat from the cops, which you will have to lose before you can do anything else. Not to mention you’ll have whoever is riding with you constantly critiquing your speed or running of stop signs. So needless to say, just turn on the speed limiter and let it take 10 minutes to get across town.
It’s such a bizarre half-open world. The reason I say half-open is because you can freely roam the map. You can buy clothes. You can steal cars and deliver them to a guy for money. You can go to several gun shops and buy extra weapons. You can buy items from an ex-thief. But why? You don’t need any of this stuff, and earning the extra money is pointless. The game makes Vito broke on purpose to further the story. The weapons are equally pointless, as the story will require Vito to surrender his guns, or limit him to a pistol, on a regular basis, and he will easily gather a small arsenal from the dropped weapons of his enemies. There’s no reason to buy guns in the game.
Ah, but there are collectibles! There are Wanted posters scattered throughout the city, which you will never find because you won’t be walking around anywhere (unless of course you go hunting for them on purpose which sounds like the most awful usage of time, ever).
And there are also… Playboy magazines?
Now don’t get me wrong, these are probably the coolest collectibles in any game ever. Finding each magazine will unlock a high-resolution, UNCENSORED image of a Playboy centerfold. But there’s a problem with this, and no, it’s not the titties.
The problem I have with this is that the game takes place in the 40’s and 50’s. Playboy didn’t release its debut issue until 1963. I know this because I was a bit of a vintage Playboy enthusiast for a small part of my teenage years. Roughly the part when I discovered porn.
Anyways, I was racking my brain for the entirety of this playthrough trying to figure out just what relevance Playboy had to any of this. ANY OF IT. And I couldn’t come up with anything.
And I’ll be honest. I was amazed these images even made the transition to the re-release. I can understand how they were included in the original release of the game. But the, um, landscape has changed in recent years. So the fact that these still exist is awesome. I’m not for censorship, but that still doesn’t mean I understand why these are even in the game. Must have been the edge factor?
Even that doesn’t make much sense, as the game repeatedly depicts Joe’s enjoyment of— we’ll call them “working girls.” Yet these ladies are always clothed. They’re in lingerie, but clothed nonetheless. I don’t care either way whether they were or not, but it was a weird dichotomy that these ladies never seemed to remove a bra, in a game littered with high-resolution real titties. It’s just another head-scratcher in a game chock full of head-scratchers.
This all probably would’ve been inconsequential, had the game been all that fun. But it really wasn’t. There wasn’t really any part of this game where I actually enjoyed what I was doing. The combat was okay at best. I enjoyed the first one more. I want to say the combat in that one was actually better. Was that because it was technically a remake, where this is just a bump in resolution and textures? Maybe.
Mafia II’s combat works, but taking cover can be really frustrating, as a lot of times it doesn’t protect Vito as much as you’d expect, and that can lead to quick deaths. Sometimes these deaths, especially later in the game, can put you all the way back at the beginning of a conflict. And as I said, the combat isn’t really all that fun, so having to go back and shoot your way through several hordes of bad guys just to get back to where you were can be annoying.
The game will repeatedly set you up for taking a hit or two. Sometimes guys will be positioned in such a way where you can’t see them, or you can’t shoot them, without exposing yourself first. And their reaction times can be brutal. There was more than one occasion where I was done in by a single shotgun blast by a guy on a catwalk or just inside a doorway, and nothing would happen until I reached the “trigger point” for the action. A lot of times Joe will be with you, shooting at bad guys and running his mouth non-stop. Whether he takes out a bad guy or two seemed to be completely random, as sometimes he’d take out a guy across the room with a single shot, but then he and another guy will be standing three feet from each other strafing back and forth and shooting and not hitting each other.
Knowing that he was basically just decoration was a bit annoying. There was a time or two when I would be in a situation where there would be a right and left path, and Joe would say “you go that way, I got this” or “I’ll take the right” and then I get killed almost immediately by a bad guy coming from the direction Joe was supposed to be taking. So if you play this game, be aware that whatever Joe says he’s got, you have to get too because he’ll likely just let a guy run right past him.
There was also a weird audio glitch in the game that would pop up every so often. Sometimes during music montages, the music would continue to play after the cutscene was over. Or after a cutscene would play, and there would be some conversation, the game would literally flicker and they would say the same thing again. Like there was a glitch in the Matrix or something. It was weird. There was even this one car conversation while I was driving— you guessed it— across town. Joe and Vito were having a conversation, but the conversation was out of sync, so they were both talking at the same time. Then they repeated the conversation, but one guy’s lines were much longer than the other, so one of them finished long before the other, and then the other guy was just arguing with himself for the next two minutes. It was bizarre, and it was getting toward the end of the game, so at this point all it got out of me was a sigh and an eyeroll because I was so over it.
There were a few graphical glitches with the game. Hilarious ones, really, that I wished I would’ve captured. Nothing game-breaking, just some polygon stretching on some of the characters. Eyeballs popping out of sockets. That kind of thing. There was this one really freaky one during a cutscene where Vito and some other guys were in the back of a car talking, and the guy driving turned his head… all the way around… and started looking at them. It was one of those moments I had to put the controller down because I was laughing so hard. I really need to set my Xbox back to record the last 20 seconds of gameplay as opposed to starting a recording, because I missed several occasions like this that I could’ve caught on video.
The ending to the game lacked any self awareness whatsoever, as you fight your way through a literal army of mob henchman, only to get to the guy and he says, “What, they sent you? I’m insulted.” Motherfucker, I just single-handedly killed about 80 of your guys, you should be shitting bricks right now. I get it, they can’t show weakness, but damn. On top of that, the game ends in a way that’s both ambiguous, open-ended, and honestly, kind of a cop-out. I’m not sure if any questions are answered in the dlc, but it didn’t look to be a continuation of the story. Just side stuff, really. But it did feel like I got cheated. The whole thing just left me feeling underwhelmed.
Anyways, I feel like I’ve ranted on long enough about this game. It’s the second Mafia game in a trilogy, and man I hope the third one is better. I haven’t gone back and read my write-up for the first Mafia game, and it’s been a while, but I feel like it was more enjoyable than this one. There’s really nothing here to recommend. It’s average.
It is game number 19 on the Virtual 100 list though, so there’s that.
