GDC 10: a second opinion on Mafia II

As a huge fan of the first Mafia game, I was more than a little jealous when Brad Nicholson got a chance to play Mafia II earlier this week.

I played through the same demo as Brad Friday afternoon, and I have to say: I came away with a much different impression of Mafia II.

Hit the jump for my thoughts.

The first Mafia emphasized atmosphere, realism and story over arcade-y gameplay or freedom of play, and Mafia II looks to do the same.

If you’re coming at Mafia II with the same expectations you might harbor for a Red Faction Guerilla or a Just Cause, you’ll likely be disappointed: this isn’t an open world bristling with crazy sidequests and fun combinations of mechanics. The world of Mafia II is meant to contextualize the story, to give the player a concrete sense of place and environment. If you’re cool with that, great — if you’re looking for the freedom to jerk around and do a bunch of different things beyond upgrading cars or buying weapons, you simply may not like what Mafia II has to offer.

As an old Mafia fan, however, the focus on atmosphere over playfulness didn’t really bother me as much as it did Brad. Yeah, you could fairly argue that modern sandbox games should have cars that control perfectly, but the same driving controls Brad found sluggish struck me as more genuinely immersive: I was driving 1950’s cars that felt like 1950’s cars, rather than the super-intuitive but fourth-wall-breaking driving controls found in GTAIII. 

Same deal with the gunplay. Brad didn’t really dig the fact that most of the guns were hellishly inaccurate, I did. And not just because the guns felt like I imagined 1950’s tommyguns and colts would feel. The inaccuracy of the guns is balanced out by their intense lethality: unlike the first Mafia, most enemies go down after one or two torso shots.

I feel awesome in Uncharted 2 when I pull off three headshots in a row while sitting fifty feet away from my enemies. In Mafia II, I feel awesome when after finally wasting four or five shots on some jerkbag, I slow down, aim, and watch the last bullet in my clip send the baddy tumbling to the ground. The guns are inaccurate, yes, but I wouldn’t say that that’s necessarily bad.

Still, I do agree with Brad that the checkpoint system was needlessly unforgiving.

There was a mission earlier in the demo where the main character joined a bunch of his mafia goons in trashing a diner owned by a rival gang. The diner was closed — nobody to shoot back at us. Me and the rest of the gangsters lined up in front of the diner, tommy guns in hand, before spraying the bullets. Our line of fire shattered the diner’s windows. I shot the individual letters off the diner’s sign.

Even though the scene was scripted and linear (I could choose where to shoot, and not much else), and even without any enemies to fight, I thought: this is what Mafia II is about. A bunch of cool-looking guys wielding period-faithful weaponry, blowing the hell out of some rival gang’s turf. It was an immersive, narratively-driven moment that may completely fail to impress anyone looking for a true sandbox experience, but might very well satisfy anyone looking for an immersive, interactive gangster story.