OnLive: Mafia II Review

Mafia II is your typical open world sandbox style free roam game, where you follow a story of a young and ambitious Sicilian on his journey. Climbing the greasy ropes of organised crime in 2Ks recreation of New York, called Empire City.

The whole story begins in the 1940s and then continues throughout the 1950s. If you love the music and cars from this era you will enjoy the vast driving journeys around the city. Lots and lots of driving in fact, which is where the majority of your time will be spent in Mafia II. There are 2 driving modes: Authentic and Normal. The authentic mode is for those who enjoy a more realistic style of driving, with effective gear changing, sliding and proper throttle “effect”. The normal mode is the typical, ala GTA style driving.

The presentation of the game is very good. The game has its own unique style which fits the time it tries to represent. The characters are distinguishable and have their own unique features, however the facial expressions are not as good as LA Noire’s which dawns down the atmosphere and immersion.

There are 3 main things you will experience in Mafia II. Driving, Melee Combat and Shooting.

Driving will take up a lot of gameplay time in Mafia II. Every segment of the game starts off with driving somewhere to initiate the actual mission and then driving to a specific place to finish it.

The melee combat is a small part of the game, however very well done. There are 2 types of punching, mainly light and heavy. There is also blocking and finishing which just require holding a button or multiple clicks respectively.

Shooting which is the most entertaining aspect of the game is fully fledged with a typical stick-cover system and aiming. The game can be played like a standard Third Person Shooter however it is more advisable to use cover, as you die fairly quickly. There are a good variety of weapons to choose from which are all authentic weapons from that era. Luckily you can keep all weapons you pick up and build up a formidable collection.

So how does a typical “level” of Mafia II look?

You start off the day waking up in your apartment and then picking up the phone which will tell you where to go. Using the wardrobe you put your clothes on which can also be bought from stores around the city.

Next thing you find a car, drive to the mission place, pick up the mission, drive to execute the mission and so on.

As you probably imagine all these days in the life of our character are very linear and scripted. There is no player made choice in this game and you are basically on a roller-coaster, executing commands. The wonderful town in which the action takes place has nothing to do. You can tune your car, buy clothes, buy weapons and thats it. The variety is nonexistent. There is only one main storyline with no side missions. This heavily hinders the replayability  of Mafia II. The only reason to replay missions is find collectibles.

Overall Mafia II offers an interesting adult story, good atmosphere and nice visuals. The story can be debated as stereotypical and failing at adding adult themes. However this is highly opinionated. The atmosphere comes from the great variety of music, realistic cars and the environment. Visuals really match the games style and the game doesn’t look like it’s 2 years old. The OnLive platform doesn’t appear to take away any graphical fidelity from the original PC version.

The game fails at offering the player a variety of gameplay. The lack of things to do in the world really cut down the games life spam. The inability of choice can be annoying to some. You don’t get to chose which “Family” you want to belong to, you only follow the story which decides for you. This really affected me as a RPG player.

If you are looking for a game set in the 50s with good gunplay and a decent but predictable story, give Mafia II a shot.

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Mike B

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