Firstly, let me say that this game in its current form suffers similar problems to many other new releases. The trend is to quickly release something that looks shiny and pretty, and yet incomplete, then sell the real fattening as DLC. And shiny and pretty it is. With a decent graphics card in your computer you are looking at a Renaissance masterpiece. Indeed, I stopped doing things with my character on the second run thru just to look at, or walk thru, the stunning scenery.

As well, the story does kind of make the player feel pretty unsympathetic to the main character. His side kick Jo seems to have more life, though brutal, than the lead character. I found myself thinking as the final scene played out that I felt no real interest in him at all. I completed the game in no particular hurry in around 12 hours – of those 12 hours, probably 25 percent was in-game movie clips – so the game has roughly 8 hours of interactive user play. Is this enough? In my opinion no. Not for the price. We have all come to expect much more (GTA set the standard) in things to do. After all this game is a single user experience only, with no multi player add to justify the short play time – such as games like Battlefield and MOD have. (They also have short single user games, but more than payback on the Multiplayer side of things. The users are being misled here by the pre launch marketing hype. It is obvious the developers put in place many things that did not make the final cut, such as commuter trains and side missions, both in the original mafia game but absent here. Forums are suggesting that development time for this game was not as long as hinted, more like 2 years with a small team of 4 or 5 developers working on it. I believe that 2K has come up against big daddy here – the expectations and profits perhaps where beginning to look threatened with perhaps and maybe an upcoming new release – who knows? Anyway, a bad decision to release this in its current form. Not because it is buggy – it isn't. Yes, there is minor clipping and a few things wrong with the boxing and sidestepping that irritate or don't work – and some other minor stuff – but on the whole the game is not laden with bugs and very playable. It is because the game promises so much more and plays so much less. Once again, the magician paints a glamorous picture, offers thunder and lightening, promising great things and in the end offers up peanuts

Mafia 2 takes you deep into the world of a mafia member – starting from his youth, you build up and loose fortunes. This game has amazing visuals, realistic combat and driving and does a brilliant job of telling the story and setting the atmosphere. Definitely worth your time.

The music, cars and weapons are all perfect for creating the setting. I haven't felt this involved in a game world since Fallout 3.

Downsides are: Very short, only ~8 hours. Steam. Minimal exploration.

Many reviewers have stated the minimal open world nature, and have heavily criticised the game for it. Personally, I think this game does brilliantly as a story driven 3rd person shooter, and just overlook the open world. The nature of the open world gives you choices for getting from A – B. There are collectables, but I figured it would take forever to get the 20 something play boy magazines and the 100 odd wanted posters.

I've played a LOT of games over the last 25 years. I'm a big fan of the GTA series. I've also played the “Godfather” and the original “Mafia”. And games have come a long way since then. At least, OTHER games have come a long way. This is just a slightly prettier version of the original, somewhat frustrating “Mafia”, complete with the lousy driving experiences and clunky combat. This might make it on the consoles, but on the PC it's rubbish. (FYI, my PC is a state of the art Intel i7 running Win7–64, with 12GB RAM, and a GForce 9800 in it). And don't get me started on the seriously awful radio stations when you're driving your steel coffin around. It's like a geriatric version of GTA 3. Do yourself a big favour and wait for a real game that's actually fun to play, because this isn't it.