First, I must say if you disregard the Mafia series as "just GTA in a historical setting" you are doing yourself a great disservice. The Original (which I'm more than halfway through) is a GTA sandbox no doubt, but one with an incredible storyline that really makes you feel like you're in a gangster movie. So suffice to say, with all its warts, I quite like the original Mafia.
Mafia 2 makes a lot of advancements; graphics being chief among them, audio quality and a combat system that includes cover. We've seen this all before with GTAIV and I would say that this game is roughly on par with that (mechanically anyway.)
The story is simple; you've been hired to help with a hit that takes place at a distillery. You start in a house that has a few things you can interact with (like changing the radio, grabbing a snack from the fridge, pick your outfit or pick up a Playboy magazine and check out the centerfold). This part is to familiarize you with the basic movements and interaction keys you'll need later (except ducking, which would come in handy...).
Once you leave the house, you are told to drive to a waypoint in just over 9 min. You get your pick of three different cars. Once you get in a car you can feel right away that this game is meant to played with a controller, the steering on PC is pretty crappy, so plug in an XBox360 controller and you'll likely be fine. That said, I much prefer shooting with mouse and keyboard and at this point there doesn't appear to be a way to combine both controller and keyboard+mouse (though to be fair, I haven't tried it).
Most of the action is 3rd person, but you can click the right mouse button for aiming your gun. If you are under cover it will pop you out so you can get a bead, again, if you are familiar with GTAIV this will feel similar.
The mission has you staking out a distillery, for some reason or other you get to fire a machine gun at about a dozen thugs rolling into the place, when the guards outside are taken out you then proceed through the building and learn how to use cover (etc), you cross the street and enter the distillery and shoot up the place ending with a Goodfellas reference. Then you gotta make your way out of the place (which is burning down now) and drive off until you are caught in a police blockade, at which point the game teases you with "to be continued".
Overall the demo is pretty much what I expected it to be, the missions and controls are well trodden territory but the story and dialog (so far) is intriguing and the setting adds quite a bit.
The maps seem a little overpopulated with NPCs, which is the opposite of the original which was quite sparsely populated. This density of people causes problems, as the number of NPCs increases your framerate drops (I'm using an Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 Ghz, a nVidia 8800 GTS & 8 GB of memory on a 500 GB SSD). When you get into battle with a bunch of NPCs and boxes, windows and concrete start shattering from buckshot I found that the FPS was dropping to 25 or so, I did some digging into this and it turns out that is the rendering of clothing which seems to slow things down. Thankfully people have already figured out how to disable NPC cloth rendering to speed up the FPS.
Pros:
-Looks interesting
-Great dialog
-Great setting
-Modernized combat
Cons:
-Driving/steering blows
-Low framerate issues caused by engine which can't be disabled
-Police are not that persistent, I was able to shake them WAY too easily
-Ammo/Health needs to be more in my face (like, upper left rather than bottom right)
Nitpicks:
-Can't change radio in stolen cars
I give the demo 3 out of 5, it did what I expected but it didn't blow me away. I will buy this game though.
