Great story crippled by poor gameplay.
Mafia 2 is a game with a great story and some good aspects combined with some really terrible gameplay.
First the good. This is the best storytelling I've seen in a video game. Not the best story but the best storytelling. By that I mean, pacing, dialogue, character relationships, scope, etc, all the intangibles that separate a good movie from a bad movie. Some movies have plots that you could summarize in a sentence but the storytelling intangibles are so rich that you're enthralled. Other movies have complex interesting plots but the action moves too fast, scenes cut too quickly, there's absolute no pacing or reaction of the characters etc. I've always said that taking a few seconds just filming setting or characters' silent reactions goes a long way towards making a movie great. I guess the foil for Mafia 2 would be a game like MGS4 where the story is outstanding but the storytelling is nonexistent. Anyways I'm digressing but hopefully I made my point.
One of the reasons the story is so good is because it's a fairly linear game. Despite the big, open city this is far from a sandbox game and comparisons to GTA 4 aren't really fair. I hate that people criticize this game for not being GTA. Sure it doesn't have the hundred extra activities that you could complete in Liberty City but those activities are lame. They are distractions. Does anyone pick up GTA and say, "The first thing I'm doing is going to play darts". You probably spent a grand total of 5 minutes bowling in GTA 4 and that's because the game forced you too so that you could keep your friends. While the extras are nice they have the downside of detracting from the story.
I'm a firm believer that the only way to tell good stories in video games is to control the pacing and delivery of that story, in other words linearity (although Dragon Age Origins has proven me wrong). You can't deliver some epic plot twist, then give the person the freedom to do 20 car stealing missions, shoot 200 pigeons, kill a couple hookers, and then expect them to come back to the next story mission remembering what happened. How would you feel about a movie if you had to watch it in 15 minute increments at a rate of 15 minutes every 3 days? Just when the story and the characters are drawing you in and tension was being established, it stops and you have to go wash your car then go to work. Now I know that the counterargument is "Well then just play all the story missions all in a row and ignore the extras if it bothers you." But because the game is expecting you to take breaks from the story, the story missions are much faster paced. Each one is expecting to draw you in and keep you interested for 15 or 20 minutes rather than establishing any sort of meaningful long term story or storytelling. So if you play them all in a row it feels like watching 10 episodes in a row of a television show on DVD. That's why in GTA right off the bat you're blowing up buildings, killing the president and fighting space marines but in Mafia 2 you're stealing gas stamps. Anyways I'm digressing again, if anyone is still reading I salute you.
I also liked the driving a lot. It felt realistic and less cartoony. You can't hit 60 mph one second after stepping into a car. The cops pull you over for speeding. I especially liked that you could outmanoeuvre cops. In GTA you can be going 200 mph and pull a hairpin 180 and the cops stay glued to your ass. In Mafia 2 with a few slick moves and some good driving you could work your way out of a hairy situation
Now the bad. The combat is horrible, just awful. It's like they said, "Let's take every development and feature added to the 3rd person shooting genre in the last 6 years and toss it all out the window." Mafia 2 plays like a mediocre game that came out during the middle of the PS2 era. There's just tons of features missing, too many to list, and the cover system is a mess. Even basics like aiming while coming out of cover stinks. There are a lot of glitches and the object permanent is terrible. You turn your back on a car or wrecked fence and when you look back it's immediately fixed. Sometimes enemies literally appear out of thin air or pop out of closed off corners the second you look away.
Your health takes way too long to recover. I know it's a seemingly minor complaint but it bugged the heck out of me. If you are always behind cover and the enemy never comes behind your cover to get you and the cover isn't destructible, what is the point of taking so long to recharge your health except just to irritate the hell out of you?
The enemy AI is the worst part. They stand out in the open, get glitched out, run back and forth or (this is the biggest frustration) stay behind cover forever. I died this way 99% of the time and it happened so much it was unbelievable. I kill about a dozen guys in a room, wait, wait, wait. Okay all clear so I start walking out of the room with my AI buddies (they don't notice anything of course) and blam I'm dead. Some idiot had been hunkered down being a pile a wood for the last five minutes without firing a single shot. WTF is that about! Time to start the whole thing over again. And it happened so much no matter how careful I was. Even the driving AI is brutal. You'll barely tap another car and it will run you off the road. Or drive across 2 lanes of traffic to hit you. It's absurd.
I still enjoyed the story and the ending was absolutely epic. I've rarely been that moved emotionally in a game. It's just too bad the game itself was so poor.