This remaster is buggier than the underside of a rock but it gave me a lot to think about in regards to my overall disliking of the open world genre. The city, much like the previous Mafia title, offers very little other than an expanse of land to drive around between and during missions. There's barely anything to do other than go between objectives, no map screen littered with loads of busywork to do. However, I found this infinitely more palatable and more effective at drawing me into the world than things like Assassin's Creed or Horizon, with their large swathes of empty, open space jam packed with filler content. I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is that allows me to tolerate the issues found here while I'll bounce off something like Ghost of Tsushima really hard and honestly, all I can put it down to is "driving a car around some roads in an interesting, atmospheric city >>>>> spending hours wandering over fields on some horse". The brilliant soundtrack does a lot of heavy lifting but there's an undeniable atmosphere here that drew me into the world.

It's obviously not the best game ever made but it plays the greatest hits of the early post-GTA 3 open world games and mob movies, with some really good performances backing up the characters and that's enough to keep it engaging for the 10-12 or so hours you'll spend in Empire Bay.

As a slight aside, this game features a 'warning' of sorts in regards to the dialogue and how it is presented 'as is' from the original 2004 release. The game is packed full of casual racism and other offensive terms. Now, I'm not in the demographic for any of these to land, so I'm definitely not the right person to be making a judgement call on any of this, but personally I found the unflinchingly 'authentic' dialogue of the 40s/50s part of what made Mafia 2's world feel so believable and I'm intrigued by how this feeds into Mafia 3.