The majority of the issues I had with Mafia II are still here: it's a run-of-the-mill third-person shooter.

That's not to say Jimmy's Vendetta is perfect. This feels more sandboxy than the 'real' Mafia II game because the missions are so short here you don't have to worry about screwing something up late in the game and getting stuck with a terrible checkpoint. In Jimmy's world, the missions are the sole focus and I found myself fooling around a bit more - I run from police rather than trying to play it straight, I fire my guns into crowds of people, and I crash rides just for the hell of it. When I was playing as Vito, I was trying to polish off a section of his life and get to the next bit of story. This focus on gameplay is a nice change of pace as the missions in Vito's Mafia II story almost seemed like filler between cutscenes. Drive over there and kill a bunch of fur thieves, steal this certain car and get it to the docks, and blow up these marked gas trucks. There's a bit of story to this - an opening cutscene recaps the basics of who Jimmy is and each mission begins with a paragraph about why you're about to do what you're doing, but for the most part these tasks are bite-sized versions of the Mafia II gameplay. Complete the quest, and all that action is boiled down into a score and letter ranking. You have to finish the job before the timer ends, and as you fly around Empire Bay blowing dudes away, you'll bank points for headshots, kills, speeding, and more. What's an arcade mission in the Mafia world? Well, you'll roll up to a floating icon, accept the mission, and a timer starts. Play Whereas the game you know from the Mafia II disc follows the story of Vito and his best friend Joe, Jimmy's Vendetta is a $9.99 download that packs 30 arcade-style missions for you to jump into from the game's main menu.

Mafia 2 review download