During my brief stint as professional gaming journalist I believed the lies and felt it was my duty to finish every game I reviewed. Within six months I had the foggy brain and bloodshot eyes of the terminally sleep deprived, and the somewhat chagrined feeling of an exhausted hack who’s just heard a respected colleague and well known gaming journalist announce that he can always tell within half an hour whether a game is worth playing or not.
Unlike him, I’d never tell anyone else to spend 50 quid based on just half an hour of playtime, but the joy of these 30 Minute Playtests is that I can use them to tell you how I feel about spending £50 of my own money and leave you to make your own mind up, without having to burst another 300 ocular blood vessels just to confirm to you that, say, Killzone 2 is actually quite good after you’ve got through the pi$$dull first six hours.
In the case of Mafia II, having only half an hour to test it is not the problem. The problem is trying to limit the number of comparisons to Grand Theft Auto. So let’s just get this out of the way: it’s an open world crime game with numerous sources of missions and a lot of driving in a large American city. And its controls are almost identical to GTA IV as well.
Having got that comparison out of the way, it important to point out that in our half hour playtest, Mafia II has plenty of things that make it stand apart from the il Padrone of open world games. It’s set in a convincingly 1950s world like The Godfather Part II. The three radio stations we’ve heard so far play a selection of classic rock ‘n’ roll and blues that you’ll actually want to listen to. The character models are widely differentiated, beautifully designed and, if anything, rather more lifelike than those found in GTA IV, and the character archetypes push all the buttons you’d want pushed in a game about ‘the family.’
Essentially, you get to dress like Don Draper, comb your hair like Dean Martin and act like Niko Bellic. The game is a little more unforgiving than similar titles, with car crashes and gunshot wounds quickly proving fatal, while the driving physics are a little blunter and spongier than those found in GTA, and significantly less bonkers than those in Saints Row, a fact which adds verisimilitude to the slow, powerful, 50s era cars you’ll be driving, all big fins and phallic bonnets.
The city, Empire Bay, seems in our first half hour of play to have that genuine, lived in feel that so many open world games strive for but only one has managed so far, so if our first impressions are true then Mafia II will have equalled one of GTA’s greatest achievements. That said,we’re not sure how interactive a city it will be-as yet we’ve been unable to climb any roadside towers or hop any walls. Its too early to tell, but Empire Bay might be brilliant on a purely horizontal plane.
We had a few moments when the dialogue assignment had NPCs uttering non-sequiturs, and their lifelike looks aren’t matched by lifelike reactions-they stand around curiously while you point guns at them, but that’s not something that would be a dealbreaker for me, and it might even be amended by the time the retail version is available.
In any case, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time with Mafia II, revelling in the familiar gameplay mechanics whilst loving the altogether classier music and mise en scene of its setting.
Verdict after 30 mins... keep on playing.