Mafia II Demo Review

[Mr. Analog]

First, I must say if you disregard the Mafia series as "just GTA in a historical setting" you are doing yourself a great disservice. The Original (which I'm more than halfway through) is a GTA sandbox no doubt, but one with an incredible storyline that really makes you feel like you're in a gangster movie. So suffice to say, with all its warts, I quite like the original Mafia.

Mafia 2 makes a lot of advancements; graphics being chief among them, audio quality and a combat system that includes cover. We've seen this all before with GTAIV and I would say that this game is roughly on par with that (mechanically anyway.)

The story is simple; you've been hired to help with a hit that takes place at a distillery. You start in a house that has a few things you can interact with (like changing the radio, grabbing a snack from the fridge, pick your outfit or pick up a Playboy magazine and check out the centerfold). This part is to familiarize you with the basic movements and interaction keys you'll need later (except ducking, which would come in handy...).

Once you leave the house, you are told to drive to a waypoint in just over 9 min. You get your pick of three different cars. Once you get in a car you can feel right away that this game is meant to played with a controller, the steering on PC is pretty crappy, so plug in an XBox360 controller and you'll likely be fine. That said, I much prefer shooting with mouse and keyboard and at this point there doesn't appear to be a way to combine both controller and keyboard+mouse (though to be fair, I haven't tried it).

Most of the action is 3rd person, but you can click the right mouse button for aiming your gun. If you are under cover it will pop you out so you can get a bead, again, if you are familiar with GTAIV this will feel similar.

The mission has you staking out a distillery, for some reason or other you get to fire a machine gun at about a dozen thugs rolling into the place, when the guards outside are taken out you then proceed through the building and learn how to use cover (etc), you cross the street and enter the distillery and shoot up the place ending with a Goodfellas reference. Then you gotta make your way out of the place (which is burning down now) and drive off until you are caught in a police blockade, at which point the game teases you with "to be continued".

Overall the demo is pretty much what I expected it to be, the missions and controls are well trodden territory but the story and dialog (so far) is intriguing and the setting adds quite a bit.

The maps seem a little overpopulated with NPCs, which is the opposite of the original which was quite sparsely populated. This density of people causes problems, as the number of NPCs increases your  framerate drops (I'm using an Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 Ghz, a nVidia 8800 GTS & 8 GB of memory on a 500 GB SSD). When you get into battle with a bunch of NPCs and boxes, windows and concrete start shattering from buckshot I found that the FPS was dropping to 25 or so, I did some digging into this and it turns out that is the rendering of clothing which seems to slow things down. Thankfully people have already figured out how to disable NPC cloth rendering to speed up the FPS.

Pros:
-Looks interesting
-Great dialog
-Great setting
-Modernized combat

Cons:
-Driving/steering blows
-Low framerate issues caused by engine which can't be disabled
-Police are not that persistent, I was able to shake them WAY too easily
-Ammo/Health needs to be more in my face (like, upper left rather than bottom right)

Nitpicks:
-Can't change radio in stolen cars

I give the demo 3 out of 5, it did what I expected but it didn't blow me away. I will buy this game though.

[Mr. Analog]

Oh yes, ANACHRONISM ALERT!!

Much of the music I encountered was from later than 1955, it didn't strike me until after I posted and saw my current forum avatar and remembered hearing Buddy Holly on the radio. IF the demo is set in 1955 (which is my understanding) then there is no way some of the music would be available, let alone on the radio.

If the setting is more 1957-58 then it would make sense and I think a lot of people could forgive the inclusion of some tracks from '59 or '60.

A big misconception a lot of people have about 50s music is that it was all Buddy Holly, Chuck Barry, Elvis, Doo-Wop and so forth, that sound didn't really heat up the airwaves until the mid-to-late 50s.

If you're curious as to what was tops on the radio in 1955, check out the Billboard top 10 for that year:
http://www.hotpopsongs.com/Music/Billboard/1955.html

/set mode rant off

[Darren Dirt]

A big misconception a lot of people have about 50s music is that it was all Buddy Holly, Chuck Barry, Elvis, Doo-Wop and so forth, that sound didn't really heat up the airwaves until the mid-to-late 50s.

If you're curious as to what was tops on the radio in 1955, check out the Billboard top 10 for that year:
http://www.hotpopsongs.com/Music/Billboard/1955.html

/set mode rant off

1956 was the first year when Elvis had a "Top 10" on Billboard (i.e. of the year, not just for a week) but WOW http://www.hotpopsongs.com/Music/Billboard/1960.html was HIS year!

[Mr. Analog]

A big misconception a lot of people have about 50s music is that it was all Buddy Holly, Chuck Barry, Elvis, Doo-Wop and so forth, that sound didn't really heat up the airwaves until the mid-to-late 50s.

If you're curious as to what was tops on the radio in 1955, check out the Billboard top 10 for that year:
http://www.hotpopsongs.com/Music/Billboard/1955.html

/set mode rant off

1956 was the first year when Elvis had a "Top 10" on Billboard (i.e. of the year, not just for a week) but WOW http://www.hotpopsongs.com/Music/Billboard/1960.html was HIS year!

That's for sure, if you look at the top 100 for 1957 it's no surprise that he ended up the King by 1960.

[Mr. Analog]

Wow, so unless you have a Quad Core and a real top shelf vid card disable PhysX on this game. When PhysX is on, even at a low setting, the framerate drops by a good 10 FPS or more.

With some tweaking I got the benchmark running at an average of 52 FPS, the game is much more playable that way.

A word to the wise: I've now played this demo on both the PC and XBox360 and I can say that the game is just a whole lot better on PC. The visuals are better, the controls are easier and it's just a lot more fun all around. Since I fixed some of the framerate issues driving seems easier too.