Mafia 2

Okay, after playing Mafia 2 a few times, I don't like it.

Let's start with the complete lack of replayability. There's a series of missions, and once you do them, that's it. I mean, I haven't played through til the end yet but that's what I heard. Plus there's little to no side quests, so literally following the story line is all you can do. At one point, going through the game for the third time (reasons to follow later) I became so bored with it, I just grabbed a machine gun from a dead policeman and unloaded on innocent bystanders. I must have killed about 100-200 people before I gave up, walked down an alley, and the cops forgot about me.

So, I cheat at my games. Yes, I won't pirate a game (not that I see anything wrong with it, Brando old buddy, and I completely agree with your last comment, but someone has to pay the makers for the games, and I'm that guy), but I see nothing wrong with cheating at the single player aspect of it. I mean, you get a bunch of programmers and game designers telling you to play the game a certain way, and they pretty much have to, because no game can be set up for EVERY contingency you might come up with, right? But what if I don't want to play things their way? This happens usually because the game is boring their way, and everyone is different, and enjoys different things, so this is going to happen sooner or later.

So one of the reasons I didn't like mafia 2 was, it's incredibly hard to cheat at. Not because of the copy protection. No, the problem was for legitimate users. Basically, the pirate-protection software they installed made it hard for trainers to work. So, I had to find a no-CD fix online in order to disable the copy protection so I could get my trainer to work. And then as soon as they updated the game, my game kept crashing whenever i tried to use the trainer. Yea, it was a big pain in the ass.

Now to the actual gameplay. Mafia 2 would make a reasonably watchable documentary about gangster life in the 40's and 50's. It does not make a reasonably fun game. Sure, it's realistic for the times. I got in my car, drove halfway across the city, did whatever it was I was supposed to do, then drove back home and went to sleep. You can't finish a mission unless you go home and go to sleep at the end of it. Me, I prefer to have a few beers first, maybe hook up with the hot babe singing at the local speakeasy.. but NO, there are no singers at the speakeasy. in fact, mostly the bars were meeting paces to get started on new missions, which, again, you had to sleep first before you could start a new one, which involved a long boring drive across the city. And it was even boring plowing through pedestrians to get there. They just never scream realistically in games for some reason, I don't know. Takes all the fun out of it.

I remember one particular mission, getting woken up by a phone call in my place. Driving across the city. Getting into a truck with my buddy. Driving to another location to... sell cigarettes. Yea... Realistic, yes, but exceedingly boring. If I wanted to sell cigarettes I'd work at 7-11. And it wasn't even a cut scene until the good parts, either. I had to literally stand in the back of the truck, waiting for the word on what kind of cigarettes the customer wanted, and then physically click on the appropriate color box, so my character would pick up a box and throw it to my buddy in the game. I kept expecting a bunch of guys to come barreling up and there'd be this mass shootout, but.. no. So then we get in the truck and drive to another place to do the same thing. And I'm handing out cigarettes, thinking how boring this game is, and finally a bunch of cars pull up and... my buddy, in a cut scene, shoots one and they all drive off. Yes. The next action I got to perform was to call my boss and tell him we got jacked. And it wasn't even a cutscene. That was the extent of the action I got to perform in that mission. Wow. Fun stuff, eh?

This pretty much follows a pattern through the whole game. At one point your character goes to jail, and you have to scrub urinals. Yea, it's not a cut scene, either. I don't really know why. Maybe this was the scariest thing the game designers could come up with. Urinal scrubbing. Oh my. But hey, following that, there was a shower brawl with some fat guys! And everyone in the shower had boxers on. Yea, okay, I am heterosexual, but I am secure enough in my heterosexuality to say "When in the history of prisons have all the guys ever showered with boxers on? Doesn't that give you wet boxers? I mean, i've never personally showered with boxers on, so I couldn't say, but I would think it would... Eh whatever. It was a short fight.

And speaking of the fighting... Yea, not that good. For a game that starts out all Call-of-Duty-ish, with an opening sequence where you are literally firing machine guns and lobbing grenades at Nazis, you rarely get to use a gun on an actual mission. half of it is straight up brawling. And the brawling isn't coded all that well. It looks good at first glance, because there's light jabs and hard swings and you can block and use finishing moves on a stunned opponent. But most of the time, you can only throw a certain type of punch when it wants you to. If you aren't throwing THAT punch, you can't throw ANY punches. I can see if it was that way for just the first fight, so you get the hang of it, but it was like that for all of them. So, while I am trying to throw a few jabs to stun this big bruiser so I can destroy him with a haymaker, he's destroying ME with haymakers because I'm not allowed to throw a jab right then and there. If I wasn't cheating, I'd have got my ass kicked all through the 40's.

I ran into a couple other annoying glitches, where I didn't know what to do or couldn't finish the mission because of it, and I gave up. I think I've already uninstalled it and moved on, so if you want my opinion, don't bother buying it, just move on to the next game. And if you don't want my opinion, then what the HELL are you doing here? Stalker.