Our first proper hands-on with Mafia II provided us with more questions than answers about its narrative-driven, open-world gameplay. For one, our ‘playthrough’ started about halfway through the game, with an introductory video composed of cut-scenes filling us in on what we’d missed out on, and giving us some insight into the backstory of its protagonist, Vito Scarletta. Apart from sharing his name with one of fiction’s other great mafiosi, Vito has a similar motive to the great Godfather for joining a life of crime. Namely, it’s cash, and he and his family are actually rather short of it.

One of these guys is a mook. We're not saying which.

Returning on military leave from WWII, Vito arrives in Empire Bay (/not/ New York, if you please) to discover that daddy Scaletta has passed away, saddling Vito’s mother and sister with a large amount of debt to the local mafia fraternity.

After his childhood friend Joe pulls a few strings, Vito manages to have his service cancelled indefinitely so he can stay home and look after his family and, inevitably, it’s not long before Vito’s gun-running as a mobster whelp – if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, as they say. We’re assured told that Vito enjoys all kinds of adventures on his way up the pecking order, but at the point in his journey where the pad was handed over to us, he was waking up in an apartment, in just a vest and pants, on another gloriously sunny morning in the Fifties.

‘Get dressed’, our first mission prompt informed us. However, mirroring our own morning routine, we headed straight to the minibar at the foot of Vito’s bed and downed five bottles of beer, one after the other. A pleasantly drunken haze ensued, which could explain why we eventually emerged from the flat dressed like a slightly pared-down Dick Tracey, all cream-coloured overcoat, fedora and shiny, shiny shoes. We felt sharp, and sharper still once we’d jumped into a red and white Buick-type affair, and started cruising down the streets to the catchy rock-n-roll lashings of Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’.

Gangsters hate Banksy. Fact.

The sun was beaming, everybody was wearing cardigans, and diners had big pink neon signs above them. It was enough to make a guy forget his mother owed the mafia thousands, and that every day wasn’t a new and frightening dice with death. Stopping only to grab a much-needed coffee, and a hotdog from a street vendor, we also noticed that every single person in the fairly populated avenue looked and moved entirely individually. Old men with finely-detailed, wrinkly faces shuffled around, while young women strode confidently. It was vibrant, full of life, and captured the era beautifully.

Still, to more pressing matters. Following our nav beacon, we caught up with Joe and ‘the boys’ to, effectively, recreate a sequence from Goodfellas. We were told to leap up to a parked truck, dispensing cartons of illicit cigarettes depending on whether passing punters requested a red or a blue box. We happily plied our trade in the disused building site, but it was mere minutes until the local greaser gang showed up, and everything went to pot. To cut a long story short, they didn’t want us on their turf, so they burned our truck to the ground then buggered off in their Hot Rod. Vito’s old Buick couldn’t cut it, so the chase was abandoned and we headed to a payphone to call up some guy called Eddie, who had his own axe to grind, but rather more than we had in the way of firepower.

… continued