Everyone has seen the movie The Godfather, but if you have ever fantasized about being a mafia gangster, then Mafia II is for you. You get to be Vito Scaletta and take over underground crime ring empires with the help of your family and crew as they in turn try to take over your businesses.

The graphics are rich, over 10 square miles in New York and Miami and full of interaction with the population and players. Cops can be bribed, witnesses and business owners shaken down for money while favors are bought and traded and politicians bribed, bought or black-mailed. Your crew can be sent to or join you on jobs and have special abilities like lock picking, safe-cracking and bombing.

Once you get some game time in and take over the first business, you have to buy guards to defend it or another rival gang will try to move in on your racket. Guards are not free, they need to get paid $100 a day each or they will walk off the job leaving your business unprotected and vulnerable to attack. So, to earn money to pay for guards, you have to keep doing jobs, favors and shake downs. Once a business is controlled by your family, you go after another business owned by a rival family until you control all their businesses.  After controlling all of a rival family´s rackets, you can go after their compound and take them out. This increases your daily income which can be used to upgrade your crew, pay off more cops and politicians and take over more empires.

The whole time playing you have to keep your crew growing and can upgrade their skills to they can defend and attack better and faster all the while keeping them out of jail or the hospital.

At the start of the hands-on portion of the Mafia II demo Vito is called on by his friend Joe to help in moving
some stolen cigarettes, but things go south fast. A rival gang shows up, claiming that Joe and Vito are selling
the stolen cigarettes on their turf. Joe shoots and kills one of the leaders, and then the two chase one of the
remaining members through a large section of Empire Bay’s highway system. Cops attempt to pull you over if you go over the speed limit, and unlike games like GTA it’s much harder to shake them. We had quite a stash of cash on us so we pulled over and bribed the cops. Unfortunately we lost the rival gang member, so we regrouped with Joe’s friend Eddie and a few of his cohorts to shoot up a building owned by the rival gang. Here the game showed off its impressive destruction mechanics; as we unloaded our Tommy Guns on the building it fell to pieces, and throwing a few Molotov cocktails in for good measure sent it ablaze.

One thing I noticed during some hands-on time was that unlike Mafia the cars move along at a speedier clip.
It makes sense, as the game is set roughly 20 years after the original, and the faster cars make it easier to
get from one place to another in the sprawling city. Though the cars handle more realistically and slower than
in other open-world games, it gives the opportunity to see some of the more detailed locales and neighborhoods 2K Czech has created in Empire Bay.

The original Mafia gave players an opportunity to live the life of a gangster, and its sequel looks set to
provide an even better crime experience for would-be mobsters.

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