Third person cover based shooting and fist fighting are your main forms of combat, while driving your way around town in purchased or stolen cars is where you’ll spend the majority of your time. If you’ve played a Mafia or Grand Theft Auto game in the past, you’ll likely already be used to the general gameplay beat of Mafia II. Honestly, beyond the NPCs, Mafia II: Definitive Edition doesn’t look out of place on today’s systems, even if it doesn’t come close to matching many higher end games. Animations look like they’ve maybe been tweaked to a degree, but they don’t seem massively different to their older counterparts. Weather effects, some environmental textures such as snow on the ground and lighting have been upgraded to a degree, while many of the car models look fantastic. Vito’s character model has been improved compared to the original release, as have many other main characters, but most NPCs still look like the same flat faced buffoons we got used to seeing in many mid-generation Xbox 360 games. The biggest change to Mafia II: Definitive Edition comes in the form of the games reworked graphics, which are somewhat of a mixed bag. The game does provide a warning about this before you begin, but I feel it still needs to be explicitly called out.

With that said, many of the themes within the game – such as its depiction of women and minorities – are somewhat poorly handled and can be a bit confronting at times. This isn’t to say the story of Mafia II is badly written or presented, it just isn’t a fantastic example of either. Vito’s humanity is a concept that isn’t explored enough through the game, leaving a lot of the more dramatic moments feeling shallow and lacking weight. As with other similar games Vito is presented as an anti-hero more than willing to murder at will, but sometimes showing a shade of a conscience when the situation would remove any semblance of humanity from his character. His story follows his rise from petty thief to mafioso, and the trials and tribulations he faces along the way. The latest publisher to jump on this bandwagon is 2K with the announcement and immediate release of Mafia II: Definitive Edition, a remaster of the 2010 open-world action game that brings it much closer to today’s standard but falls just short of them.įor those unfamiliar with the game, Mafia II follows the story of Vito Scaletta, an Italian-American man who immigrated to America as a child. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, given the quality of re-releases like Final Fantasy VII Remake and Trials of Mana, but the sheer volume of them in the first half of the year feels almost unprecedented. It truly feels like 2020 is the year of remasters and re-releases.

Mafia 2 definitive edition review