Playing Now: Mafia II - Boring Start

Started playing this recently, and so far I'm about 4 hours in. I got it for free on a sale with Borderlands 2. I have to say I don't exactly like what I've seen so far. The way I see it, you can break down a game into three aspects when considering its merits: Story (plot, dialog, lore), Gameplay (core/secondary mechanics, level design, difficulty), and Presentation (graphics, visual art, music). Now, I don't think it's crazy to require for a game to stand out in at least one of these three facets to be considered 'Good'. Of course, some people might give more importance to one over the others, for example, I tend to put more weight on the first two over the last one (though I still think Presentation is very important, and some games live alone on this, like Journey).

The thing about this game is that, so far, it's not standing out on any of these three components. When it comes to the story, well, plot is basically non-existent. Italian guy gets involved with the Italian mob — that's it. Dialog is made out to make characters extremely boring. Heck, I would like to say that Vito, the main character, is one-dimensional, but the truth is that he's more like zero-dimensional. The guy is kind of an asshole, and there's is no attempt to give any motivation for him to do what he does, whether being bad or good reasons. You could try to argue that he's doing it for the money, but no attempt is made to show that he has any ambition — he's just going along. He just doesn't work well as a character. Moving on to gameplay, well, the main mechanics are shooting, driving, and fighting. The shooting is not bad, but is not good either — very run-of-the-mill stuff, in fact, it can be a bit loose at times. The driving is boring, and can feel more like a chore since missions always have you driving from one end of the map to the other. The cars are good looking, but they don't handle well, which can make the driving frustrating at times. The fighting is just too easy, in other words, uninteresting.

All of this leaves us with only one possible redeeming point: the Presentation. And yeah, the game does redeem itself here. The character models look great (though it is kind of awkward that the character model for Vito's sister looks exactly the same, sans hair color, as a girl that tries to hook up with him later), and the city (Empire bay) is beautifully rendered, though I didn't find it particularly interesting. What I do love is the car models, of which there's enough variety, and they all look great! The music is another story. Maybe it's just the music from the period (1940's), but I didn't like it that much. You can listen to the radio as you drive (as far as I can remember, you can't change the station), and in fact I liked better when the news came on, as they kept giving updates of the current events on the war.

So there you have it, that's my initial impression for this game. But if I've learned something over time, is that first impressions are just that, so I'm reserving the right to radically change my opinion as I keep playing. And I will keep playing!

Origins

So I've started this blog as an outlet for writing about my main hobby (video games). Figure I start by talking about the latest game I played, Batman: Arkham Origins. This is a game that, in my opinion has been extremely unappreciated. It holds a Metacritic score of 74, which is extremely low compared to the previous two entries in the franchise, which hold scores in the 90s. Now, a score is just a score, and frankly to me they don't mean much. In this context, however, I'm using them only as a point of comparison between the three games in the franchise, which would seem to suggest that Origins just plain bad compared to the first two games, or at least, of much lower quality, which in my opinion is just not true. I loved this game!

I'm not going to say this game doesn't have problems, because it does. For example, the plot has a weak start, but it certainly picks up a third of the way in, and turns into quite an interesting story, with quite an engrossing exposition of the relationship between Batman and The Joker. There's also a bit off with the combat, which in some instances doesn't quite 'flow' like in the previous two games. It took me quite a while to put my finger on it, but I finally realized it has to do with enemy AI and how some fights are set up in such a way that break the perfect balance that was ubiquitous in the previous two games. This problem is not pervasive, and one gets used to it after a while, but that's the thing, they changed the dance, and at times it just doesn't feel quite right. Other than that, the combat system is just as engaging as it was in the previous games.

So maybe this game places below the previous Batman games, but not to the extent it was made out to be.