I realized recently that all of my game related posts tend to meld in to a repeated pattern of “THIS IS AWSUM!” Now, generally speaking that’s accurate. I tend to be choosy with what games I spend much time with. Oh, I’ve played some dog shit games, I just tend to realize early how crapulent they are and hurl them aside like worthless garbage (Oh hai, Space Siege).

But every now and then, one sneaks through the defenses. It starts out fine but gradually takes the off ramp straight to shit town. Mafia II was such a game. Combine memories of increasingly tortured hours slogging through that mess with a need to up the blog’s rant quotient, and you get this post.

Mafia II is, as you may have guessed, yet another story about a bunch of Italians who grow up to be criminal underlords (that apparently being the only direction available for Italians, aside from opening pasta restaurants or yelling at their significant others). You play the guy in the middle (Vito). The dude on the left is your retard friend Joe…he’s that typical weird/aggressive buddy everyone grew up with who at some point is going to reach a fork in the road and either become the class clown and entertain with wacky hijinx or start mutilating animals for fun and writing a manifesto of some sort.

Anyway, you get arrested for helping Joe rob a jewellery story and sent off to help the Army fight the Second World War. Off you go to Italy, since you speak the language of shouting loudly at people who share your heritage…you’ll fit right in! Actually, the war level is a nice way to introduce the cover and combat mechanics. You end up getting hit, you go back home and for some reason you decide to hang around with Joe again, leading the player to wonder if maybe you weren’t the retard friend the whole time.

He has connections who get you out of the Army, and you’re free! You’re also broke. And your father ran up a lot of debts before he died, those debts being with the kind of people who accept payment in either cash or screams of pain as they shatter your tibia with a hammer. You need a job, and Joe could use a running buddy…

The game is flooded with atmosphere. It IS 1945.

The buildings look the part, the clothes look the part, the cars look the part. Everything works. The radio is full of jazz and crooners and radio announcements about what’s going on in the Pacific.

And it goes beyond that. This isn’t a homogenized ‘modern take’ version of the way the world was. Let’s just say that when you’re warned to ‘keep an eye on them spooks’ it has nothing to do with the sorts of ghostly mysteries Scooby Doo and the gang spend time trying to solve when they aren’t trying to get Red Herring busted for crimes he didn’t commit or hot boxing the mystery machine.

But then you start playing. And driving. And driving. AND FUCKING DRIVING. Morgan Freeman spent less time behind the wheel in Driving Miss Daisy, and he certainly had more dignity as he ferried some bitter old white woman around and said things like “Yes’m, Miss Daisy!”

You drive from your apartment to pick up Joe. Now, Joe will usually insist on taking his car, at which point you realize you wasted ten goddamn minutes stealing one and a couple of bucks getting the plates changed to keep the cops off your trail. So you drive Joe’s car…and yes, YOU drive his car. You drive EVERYONE’S car. Am I a fucking chauffeur? I realize driving AI is difficult to do, but come on! Did we HAVE to drive to every single meet to get the missions? Couldn’t we just skip to a cinematic of the mission description that ends up with the fucking car out front? Apparently not, because drive to the meet…then you drive TO the mission, after which you drive your idiot car mates home and finally get back to your apartment. 80% of the mission is spent driving around and doing nothing at all related to the actual mission. Not exactly winning level design.

But the story was decent, so I kept playing. And it was picking up. Then came the gas stamps mission. Well, not the actual retrieval mission…that was a fun little stealth caper…but the one that followed.

It’s war time, so gas is rationed. You go in to steal some stamps, silently taking out the guards. Fun little caper, more so if you found the switch that cuts off the power to the safe alarm before opening it. What followed was probably shat out by some lesser demon and forced in to the game.

You have 1 hour of game time to get to 5 different gas stations, because the stamps need to be…well…stamped…before midnight hits, or they’re worthless. This hour of game time gives you approximately 6.3 seconds of time to spare if you do everything perfectly.  Honestly, if you miss a turn you might as well start over because you are now fucked. You’re driving late 30’s/early 40’s cars and the roads are glare ice. You’re missing turns. You’re careening in to everything. You’re cursing the existence of whatever spiteful son of a bitch designed this sequence and thought it was good.

And then you finish it. And then you go to jail.

I actually liked this. It shook everything up. You meet an imprisoned capo named Leo from another family in the city (you learn that there are 3, and the ones you were hooked up with are lying sacks of crap who were trying to rip you off). You also join an underground fight circuit he runs, which is a great way to teach you how the melee combat mechanics work. Eventually you get out.

And the whole thing starts to fall apart.

At first, I was thrilled. It’s the 50’s now, and the entire atmosphere has changed. They clearly put a lot of time in to the transformation, and it shows. Everything reflects the change of eras. The news is now full of amusingly quaint reports about such crazy inventions as TV dinners and a computer. The trouble is, someone forgot to change the rest of the game. You’re doing the same missions you were doing before your time in the clink, only in newer clothes. It’s getting pretty samey.

And the story starts to unravel. You join up with a different mob family, but you don’t even try to get in with Leo or his crew…no, you join the group run by a guy that he described as crazy. Why? Who in the fuck knows. Maybe you’re following Joe again, revealing further what a mouth breathing mongoloid you truly are.

You do more missions. You end up killing the don of the family Leo is in because they’re running dope (the mob of this era did not exactly look kindly on drug smuggling). You and Joe bring in a buddy named Henry from the family you ran with before prison time (hopefully you followed that) who is then sent to kill Leo. So it’s another FUN AS HELL timed mission to get there first! Eventually you do so, convince Henry to stage the hit but not really go through with it, but then your boss finds out that the guy didn’t get whacked but shrugs it off…probably with a “Fuhgeddabouttit!” while he’s eating some spaghetti. Cause, you know, if there’s one thing that organized crime syndicates are known for, it’s letting bygones be bygones. Oh, and not getting too hot and bothered about members actually finishing tasks. Oh, and you learn during that mission that it’s YOUR syndicate who’s actually running heroin around town. HA! What MAROONS, these guys are! Oh well, we just blew up an entire crime family, but what of it? Bygones, remember?

Things are good…until some Irish bastards burn your house down. See, you killed an Irish gangster type inside and they have somehow learned about it even though only you and him knew about it. And he’s dead. Maybe he’s a zombie now? I don’t know. What it all adds up to is a convenient way to have you broke and starting from scratch. Or, as I like to call it, utter bullshit and lazy storytelling.

Now you need money. Hey, I know! Howzabout you and Henry and Joe undercut your own mob family and start selling smack! How can this POSSIBLY go wrong! While it was never shown during the game, I can only assume that you are prone to pratfalls resulting in head trauma on a regular basis during the game because you gradually become dumb enough that the construction of a cheese sandwich would probably leave you befuddled.

You go forward with a plan so goddamn stupid that the whores who still expect a violence free weekend from Charlie Sheen would realize is a really bad idea. SHOCKINGLY, it ends horribly and with Henry getting his face chopped up in a public park by a bunch of Chinese dudes with meat cleavers. Time for revenge! I mean, sure, you’re now blowing apart the whole syndicate that supplies dope to your fucking mob boss, but mafia kingpins are well known for their understanding and willingness to just blow off losing millions of dollars, right?

Apparently so, because NOTHING HAPPENS. You go down to the docks to talk to the fat fuck in charge there and see if he’s got any jobs that need doing, and he’s having a bit of trouble with his dockworkers not working. So you grab a shotgun and head out to convince them otherwise with his main muscle and a few others. Your dad worked the docks, and some of the other guys recognize you. And they tell you that Captain Fat Fuckbag and his sidekick actually killed him. No explanation for WHY they did so, they just did.

You have spent this entire game denigrating your father’s memory at every turn. But all of a sudden it’s apparently time for a fucking Hallmark moment because you care now. You’re not going to help these icky crime lords any longer! Sure, it was cool when you were killing and maiming dozens of other people by their order, but THEY killed your DAD, a man you have treated with scorn for the entire game. That…yeah, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Even more dumbly, the other 5 guys with big guns who are still loyal just leave…they don’t kill you on the spot, they leave.

And of course they do, because now you get to fight your way through them to the warehouse! AHA! I see what’s going on there! And they’re eager to retreat to the warehouse because it features THE CHEAPEST FUCKING DEATH I HAVE EVER SUFFERED IN A GAME.

The whole game, combat has revolved around the cover system. You take cover, shoot over and around it to pin guys down and aim when you can. Whenever you get a chance, you shift to a new spot and move up. Only THIS time they start throwing molotov cocktails that light the cover on fire. If you are so much as hiding behind the crates, you immediately go up like a roman candle covered in napalm. And the bad guys actually laugh at you! “HAHA! We’ve used what you’ve learned to use this whole game against you, you piece of crap! Suck on THAT!” Okay, so you don’t use the crates…and get riddled with bullet holes by dudes up on the catwalks with tommy guns. Oh, but they aren’t quite done with your ass yet….remember that warehouse you started in? The one at the other end of the docks, where you had to fight through it to get to these cheap fuckers? Yeah, that is where you start over.

They KNEW everyone would die within seconds of that main warehouse. They built the goddamn level to make it happen! And yet they put the save point back about 5 minutes, so you aren’t even close to just being able to dive right in to it again. I can only assume that 2K Czech are staffed completely by people raised by old Nazis who escaped prosecution after the war. These are the bastards who were torturing people for shits and giggles, and they’ve been set loose on raising a generation of absolute asshole level designers.

It was at this point that I said a hearty “Oh, fuck you!” to the monitor. I then quit and uninstalled this vile piece of detritus.

And the thing is, this was the second to last chapter of the entire game. I guess Leo tells you he’s pulled strings to keep the mob from taking you out for really entirely fucking them over IF you kill the mob boss you’ve been working for who was running dope. I DID find a video of the end cinematic and wanted to see it because a lot of people have complained it was bad (which seems hilarious considering the state of the game by this point) :

So, THAT is what people are complaining about? REALLY? Repercussions for the two of you blowing away half the goddamn Mafia in the entire state?! Christ, THAT actually made sense! What I’D like to know is what drugs the writers were taking between the prison sequence and that ending, because a lot more of that might have helped!

This is one of those games that actually angered me because it started so well and then just took a big twirly slide in to an open septic tank. It was like the game equivalent of that goddamn Apocalypto movie…going from “Wow, this is really good.” to “Holy shit, why doesn’t everyone involved in this heap just appear on camera and tell me that they think I’m a jackass!” within hours. Argh. The only consolation is that I won this game in a contest and spent nothing on it. Ugh.