A comparison of many Mafia features https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixlszwKVVP0

Mafia II mimics the original pretty well, but doesn't have the courage to do its own thing, nor the strength to punch as hard. As it stands, it's a competent game, but one that never leaves the original's shadow.
Pros: Great music, detailed city, good story and writing, occasionally funny, solid driving and gunplay, some great/cool moments, plenty of ideas to spruce up the gameplay...
Cons: ...but none of them are implemented in an interesting/meaningful way, wooden animations and flat voice acting bring many important scenes down, melee combat is extremely basic, dumb AI, city's potential is severely underused, not much to do in the city and the city itself feels artificial, poor pacing and plenty of padding

The vibe, man.

Who wants more Mafia?

gave this a 9 just for the believable characters

Let me start this with saying I LOVE THE 40's &5 0's! The cars, clothes, music everything about that decade. M2 did such a good job putting you in that time. The story start's off with Vito (your character) coming home from WWII and meeting up with his body Joe. You go working your way up though the ranks of the mob. Even though this is a open world game like GTA, there's not as much stuff to do M2 than GTA. M2 focuses more on story than a bunch of side stuff as GTA (not saying gta games story's are bad). If you like games like GTA or third person action games i think you'll like Mafia II.

Mafia II was alright. I felt that the story expected you to feel for the characters before it even built a relationship to actually make you care about them. The story's pacing was very strange. The collectable posters and playboy magazine seemed like an afterthought rather than a feature. I ended up getting stuck on a level which had a bug that would force me to replay previous missions in order to progress so I never finished it. I was sorely disappointed that even though I played it 8 months after release, such a game breaking bug wasn't patched.