Mafia Ii: Director's Cut For Mac
Review: 2K Czech's Mafia 2 was released back in late 2010 but now it's out on Mac thanks once again to the fine folks at Feral Interactive who ported over this tale of greed and corruption in the mobster underworld. But we aren't just getting Mafia 2, we also get the Director's Cut with all the extra DLC content packs. Everything starts with Vito Scaletta, the game's protagonist. His family moved from Italy to America when he was young and he grew up on the streets with his best friend Joe. After getting into trouble and caught by the police, Vito is drafted into the army for 2 years until he gets wounded and set back home on leave. He's set to go back to the fight overseas but his friend Joe helps him out and gets him papers so he can stay.
Vito, saddled with his deceased fathers debt, and ailing mother and sister, needs to make a quick buck. He teams back up with Joe to take on some shady jobs. One thing leads to another and soon Vito and Joe are making their way up the criminal chain and getting in with the various families who control the city. The story spans 10 years of Vito's life from family time to winding up in jail to becoming a made man. The game has 3 pillars of action: shooting, melee fights and stealth. It is possible to run and gun a little, but mostly you'l want to stick to cover and then pop out to blast your enemies, otherwise you'll be shot up pretty quick. A variety of period weapons are available, as you might expect.
Mafia Ii: Director's Cut For Mac 2017
Choices includ a few different pistols, rifles, a shotgun, and the classic tommy guns. You also have molotov cocktails and grenades, but these are in limited supply. A number of story missions require you to fight hand to hand, and fortunately these are fun and entertaining 1 on 1 battles. You have a light attack, heavy attack and a dodge, and later on you learn a counter move, as well as having a variety of vicious finishing moves.
Stealth is underutilized but still solid. You can sneak up on foes and quietly strangle them or maybe push them off a ledge. Networking servers.
Only a few sections call for stealth and it's a shame there's not more of it because it's fun and requires you to use the cover system to avoid being seen. Mafia 2 is an open world game with a lot of action elements but in the end it really is a mob drama with all the darkness, thrills and twists and turns you may or may not expect. The story pulls no punches with all the violence, money, cars and women that the Mafia lifestyle typically depicts, as well as being punctuated by moments of shocking brutality. The game doesn't glorify or vilify what's on show, just displays it to you. The pace is perfectly set and driven forward well by the missions and character interaction. There's a few poorly set checkpoints on some difficult missions that can set you back awhile, but mostly they are fine.
It will take you about 12 hours to finish the main story and the conclusion is mostly satisfying but does leave some threads unfulfilled. Visually speaking, Mafia 2 is gorgeous. If you can run the game on high it's a treat. Empire City is a beautifully recreated period setting in the 1940's and later in the story, the 1950's. Streets are bursting with detail from people to cars and everything you'd expect to see as you motor or walk around.
At different times the weather changes and the effects are great. If it's snowing, women walk around in fur coats arm in arm with finely dressed gentlemen.
In the rain people huddle under buildings or walk about with umbrellas, hurrying to and fro. Audio is just as smooth as the graphics. Story missions are set to a great score, and every car you get in has different radio stations playing period music if you want to listen to it. Sound effects in general are good from cars, collisions, gunfire and explosions. This goes a long way to making fights with your fists or a firearm feel punchy and satisfying. All the voice acting is top notch with well done accents, lines and script.
Performance wise I was able to run the game with everything on high on my higher end mid-2010 iMac. I did expect to be able to run it at a higher resolution but the game did chug when I tried to do that.
Still it didn't detract from the experience and the game was smooth and bug free from what I could tell. It crashed on me once to the desktop, but that seemed random as I was just driving on the highway. Pages: 1 Mafia II: Director's Cut.