Just finished it and loved it, my review.

Yes I know, the game is old, but I only just got it and finished it last night.
This post is just about what I think about the game, not that my opinion matters but I wanted to share it anyway.

For starters, I'm not your average gamer.
I'm a 40 year old business woman but I've been gaming ever since the first computer games became available.

I loved Mafia 2 even though there are some things I didn't like as well, of course.

I love history, no I'm obsessed with it.
As part of my job I make sure movies, tv, museum exhibits and maybe one day games, are authentic, historically correct.
And I was very impressed with the setting of this game.
I didn't spot many annoying mistakes (except playboy in the 1940s, a few songs out of date and some of the hairstyles and clothing) and just LOVED the general historic atmosphere.
The city was so amazing, the cars, the music, fantastic.
This is a game I will play again and again, just to have a little drive trough the lovely locations.
Truly amazing.

I just tried "GTA 4" and was extremely disappointed with the look of the game, so ugly compared to what I just saw in Mafia 2.

Anyway, I think most of us can agree on that the game looked good.

But now the gameplay.
I actually quite liked the story, I liked the main characters right away, enjoyed the dialogue and laughed out loud a few times.
Very well done, especially for a game.
I must confess there have been games where I did not bother letting the cut scenes play out, being to impatient, wanting to play on.
Not with Mafia 2.
And the best thing about it, is that it gave me a bit of a depressed feeling.
Driving around the city, alone, no mamma, sister not wanting to have anything to do with me, not trusting my friends, just having lost my home to fire... it felt a bit hopeless, the shallowness of a life of crime.
The ending as well, even though crime did pay in goods and riches, in the end our hero was poor in many other ways.
Sorry for the philosophical rant there

So in short, I loved just about everything about the game, the look, the gameplay, the shootouts, etc.
I was in awe of being in a fierce firefight and seeing just about EVERYTHING being shot to pieces around me.
Stuff breaking and falling over everywhere.
Intense.

But of course there are things I didn't like either.
I care a lot about realism and although I know that it is very demanding on a computer, I would liked to have seen bodies and damage not disappear in front of me.
Truly fantastic that when you shoot someone in a shop, police comes and it is turned into a crime scene, but during the fight itself it is annoying to me to see bullet holes and the bodies of police men magically disappear.
These are of course minor complaints that you could repeat for countless other games.
A stronger complaint, one I seem to share with many others, is regarding the storyline and the shortness of the game.
It was all over a bit too soon, too dramatically.
Once you figure out how to be a good shot, even the final big fight is not that hard to master.
And then poof, it is all over.
I don't mind sudden endings and even endings that make you feel bad (poor Joe!) but at least you should sort of be able to accept it, understand it and feel that it is a good ending.
I didn't quite feel this way about Mafia 2.
If a game has such strong characters and makes you actually like some of these piles of pixels on two legs, they should use that more.
Do I have any right of speaking?
Maybe, I have written scripts for tv and published two books, so I think I may know a little bit about story writing.
You are left with many questions at the end, almost like a "Watch next week for the conclusion of our story" sort of end.
We don't need to know everything, not everything has to be explained, but well the end was a bit sudden and odd.
I would have been happier if they just killed both main characters in a field somewhere.
Horrible, disappointing, upsetting... but realistic and an acceptable way to go if you're in this line of business.
I would have preferred an ending where you are told that because of all the mess you are in your career in the family has ended, you will spend the rest of your life doing a boring job or being a small time crook.
AND then after a nice little movie you return to your dirty small apartment and are told that the game is over and you can now free roam, do little missions and just cause trouble as much as you like.
That last bit SHOULD of course be in the game once you finish it.
Now I have to go load a scene every time I just want to go for a little cruise.

I wouldn't like a happy ending, but it would be perhaps more satisfying to most.
Because the one positive thing about the game is the strength of friendship, these two childhood friends remain loyal to each other trough a lot of trouble.
So, perhaps predictable and a bit soft, but a good old final chapter where our hero shoots the men in his car, jumps behind the wheel and saves his friend before the sail off into the sunset to begin a new life (with fake mustaches) would at least feel a bit more like a real ending.

What I missed most though is the lack of sidemissions and storylines regarding the other people in the game.
As I said before, you actually grow to like these characters.
But many we rarely see back.
We love our mamma, we love our sister, we even love our old neighbourhood where people in the street welcome us back from the war.
I think it would have been great if there had been a few missions regarding these people.
We only have to do something regarding our sister once, that could have happened a lot more.
How about we help the old street with some of their local issues, beat up a drunk causing trouble for everyone, make sure a dead beat landlord fixes some of the falling apart buildings, make the city council clean the area.
Mamma is great, she deserves more of our attention.
How about we help her find a new home, how about when she gets ill we race her to the hospital.
Our sister, we care so much about her, we beat up her husband, but we never go visit before that happens?
How about we do a few missions for her as well, maybe meet her husband when he is still cool and friendly (making the beating him up mission harder or at least more interesting), help them get a new apartment, beat up their neighbours who cause trouble or maybe kick some dopeheads out of their house so your sister can move in
Doing missions for the most important people in your life besides the mafia will make it even harder and more depressing at the end when your mother dies when you're in jail and your sister never wants to see you again.
Imagine having a mission where you get to visit your sister at her new home, see your nephew (soooo cute, looks just like you when you're a kid), see this idyllic 1950s home life that you will never have.
Spend christmas with this lovely family, feel the envy but also feel happy for them... just to see it all fall apart later when you beat the husband up.
Maybe one final mission where you hear about your nephew having trouble and you secretly follow him to take care of his bullies of to make sure he doesn't get into the life you are into.
Missions like these will be a fun alternative to all the gangster missions, they will make you like the characters even more and it will be even harder to later have no contact with them anymore.

What I also would like in this game is the option to return to locations from missions.
Visit the damaged hotel you blew up, go to your mothers home after she died (be sad to see it all empty ;) ), go into bars and clubs even if you finished the missions there.
It adds to the realism and atmosphere of the great city.
I LOVED going back to the house I lived in that was firebombed and see the damage, so real!

I would also liked to have seen more progress.
You quickly make a lot of money that you can't really spend on much.
But as a gangster you don't move up in the world much.
You go from crappy apartment to 1 nice house and then back to crappy apartment.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE THE APARTMENTS, absolutely stunning locations, great overall look and feel.
I think that it is great that we eventually lose the nice house, it actually hurts a bit and the general game story of 'in the end crime does not really pay after all' is a depressing but good one.
But this could have been made more extreme by giving us more apartments to live in and destroying the best one later on in the game.
We have thousands of dollars, why not let us rent a fancy room in a luxerious hotel, move on to a even nicer house in a better part of town?
The more luxury you give us the more it hurts when it goes up in flames.

But in the end, and I think I agree with most people on this forum here, the main thing that is really bad about the game is that when you finish it all, there isn't a free roam option.
Game over, now click here to drive around a bit, do little jobs to make money so you can perhaps go back to living at the nice hotel, just have some fun.
Of course I bought the addons and in those you get to free roam till your heart is content.

Anyway, having said all that, I still LOVED the game.
Mostly for the stunning experience of driving around the fantastic historical locations.
This game has that rare quality that some games have; you keep coming back after you finished it.

Complaining about mistakes is almost as bad as complaining about complaining about mistakes.