i think you’d have to be pretty lame to take cool subject matter like the mafia and make a boring game out of it. well i’ve been right before
there’s so much goddam driving in mfaia 2. i cant stand it. its like, they should’ve just made a racing game about prohibition because clearly that’s their only interest. so many missions have you just driving from one side of the map to the other and back. why? i hate this artificial game-lengthening. its like they tried to cut down on development costs by making fewer missions that take longer because you have to fuck around in slow-ass cars while following traffic laws. you have to follow traffic laws in this game. it’d actually be pretty cool except that you do so much driving it gets really boring. also the other cars arent held to the same rules. like if two other cars run into each other the cops dont care. but if i hit a car, the cops ticket me. i feel like if my character was black it’d be deep social commentary.
all the driving would be a bit better too if the characters would ever shut up. i hate when open world games do this. they give you a shit-long road to drive along to your objective while some nanny prattles in your ear. it’s just an extended cutscene. thing is, i skip cutscenes, but i can’t skip this horrible overwritten overacted vapid crap. i’ve never heard so many grating accents in my life. i don’t know if italians actually sound like this but if they do then i’m not surprised that they kill each other.
the combat is pretty standard cover shooter. there’s some cool aesthetic stuff, like your character recoils away when bullets whizz by. unfortunately that doesn’t affect your aim so you can be flailing around and still making headshots. also the cover system sucks. you’ll constantly get shot while in cover because pieces of you stick out incredibly far, so you get that weird situation where you’re killing enemies in one or two shots while eating about 20 bullets yourself. if you’re going to put a cover mechanic in your game, it has to actually stop bullets, otherwise i might as well just run up behind a barrier like we all used to do back when our games didn’t think for us.
one last thing about the missions that pisses me off is that they don’t follow the same rules as the open world segments. in the open world stuff if you shoot someone a patrol car comes in about 10 seconds. but there are missions where you use a huge fuckoff mg42 (i am not joking) in a street and then have a rolling shootout through a factory which eventually explodes and the cops never show up. this is so fucking dumb. what’s the point of establishing these gameplay rules if you just throw them away all the time in missions, it’s like you’re penalizing me for not being in a mission by making it hard for me to do anything fun, like shoot or drive fast. not that the missions are fun. there’s one where you sell cigarettes out of the back of a truck. you have to drive to the location and manually sell like 5 boxes of the cigarettes by walking to the right box and pressing a button. ugh.
it’s a game about the mafia. i should be going and performing gang hits and stuff. not driving around. the driving isn’t important. remember that scene in the goodfellas where they’re driving and it’s just them driving?
no.
