Mafia II – Complete
Playtime: 6.5 hours (14 hours total)
Personal Rating This Session: 3 - The last few missions of the game are a complete bitch, with sparse checkpoints and unreasonable difficulty. The game ends sadly, but I had too much of a migraine to really care.
As you can see from this chart, the game started out strongly and ended really weakly for me. Mostly because 3-4 of the last 6.5 hour play session was spent retrying entire missions over and over and over because I either died, or an NPC bugged out. By the end, the only thing that made me keep trying was that I knew I was so close to finishing it, and I didn't want to add this to a pile of games I almost finished.
There's still DLC to play, and though I started one of them, I'll have to give Mafia II a bit of a rest before I pick them back up.
This game confused me a lot; there seemed to be a lot of elements that didn't exist for any logical reason, now that all's said and done. Money, for one. I amassed a huge amount of wealth, and lost it all, and amassed it again, and I didn't really find anything to spend it on except sometimes repairing my vehicle. Most of the time I just stole the nearest car, or took a car an NPC wanted me to take, so upgrading/repairing/painting cars I was attached to was a nice one-time thrill, but that's it. When only 10% of the game is driving, and there are only 2-3 garages to retrieve saved vehicles, I realized it's way quicker to just steal a car and be done with it.
There's no point to buying guns in the game because all the guns I could possibly want are giving to me in the missions. On top of that, they took away my guns every chapter or two. There was no point in customizing my cars, because I could never access them easily. There's no point in eating, because I could really only eat at home, and if I was home I was going to sleep soon, which fully recharged my health. There's even absolutely no point to half the map, which is a separate island that has exactly one mission on it.
I liked the sandbox-lite feel of the game for its focus, and there's a couple story twists that are pretty cool. But this is all overshadowed by a complete lack of understanding on basic checkpoint principles, and an overly empty feel of the game mechanics.
