There’s nothing like a few gallons of gore to take the shine off a nice Italian leather shoe. It’s a hard-edged run through lots of kill-or-be-killed brutality. So what’s the point, then, of playing as a stone-cold mobster if hard-case consequences are the real deal? Well, it’s … um, it’s … And those who dabble in power and murder end up paying the ultimate price themselves. Ill-gotten gain is eventually stripped away. Criminals go to jail, no matter how well dressed. The game also makes it clear that a life of crime has its consequences. It’s just something he has to put up with. And you can tell from his stoic frown that he doesn’t really like killing blacks and Asians, pushing drugs to the masses and crudely manhandling prostitutes. He’d go to great lengths to protect them. On top of that, some of the bad guys, particularly the dark-haired, handsome Vito, seem almost thoughtful in their approach to the “necessary” criminal things of life. Thugs sport sleek suits and Fedoras-and they listen to Bing Crosby, The Andrews Sisters, Dean Martin and Dinah Shore while working on their whacking.

As the game begins, the city streets are sprinkled with snow, women wear topcoats and high heels, and the men bustle off to work in jackets and ties. No abrasive rap music or thugs dressed in wife beaters and polyester running jackets here. Setting everything in the 1940s and ’50s “helps” with that. The difference here, however, is the lengths to which Mafia II goes to make the carousing, thieving and bloodletting feel “classier” and more “palatable.” There are obvious genetic similarities between all these sandbox-style third-person shooters. Now, if the action and city settings I’ve described so far sound a whole lot like Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row, that’s for good reason. And though the open-world map of Empire Bay is huge, it never feels unmanageable as the game leads players through 15 chapters of murder and mayhem. The gameplay itself is pretty simple, with intuitive controls for your lockpick manipulations, stolen-car maneuverings and quick weapons switches-tapping an arsenal of handguns, shotguns and military-grade machine guns (not to mention a rock-hard pair of fists). Vito falls in and out of various murderous Mafioso allegiances on his way up the ladder to becoming a “made” man in one of the major families. And once the Scalleta family debt is paid off, well, there’s no turning back now. And then his responsibilities eventually ramp up to a full-on mob hit. So the slick-haired wiseguy-wannabe starts with small jobs-muscling some uncooperative dockworkers, moving a few thousand black market gas coupons and swiping a car or two. And with leg-breaker goons leaning on Mom and Sis, the game makes it clear that Vito really only has one choice. Vito’s dockworker father recently passed away, and his mother and sister are struggling to keep up with a loan shark debt the old man left behind.Īs Vito, gamers are given the choice to break their virtual backs lugging crates at the dock for 10 dollars a day, or tap into Joe’s “connections” for some big money in a hurry. But things really get rolling in Mafia II in 1945 when twentysomething Vito comes back from the war and starts hanging out with his childhood pal Joe. A brief prologue points out how tough life could be for Italian immigrants moving to Empire Bay in the 1930s.

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