EndWeekGame: September 10

Andrei Dumitrescu: I've finally gotten around to playing Mafia II, after a few weeks when I was to busy to give it time, and plan on pushing through the single player narrative during this weekend, mainly to see whether all the criticism that has been leveled at the 2K Czech developed title was warranted.

So far I can understand the claim that Mafia II is not quite an open world title, even though it was sold as one.

The city in the game, while beautiful and pretty big, feels more like a diorama than an actual living breathing city.

Liberty City, which Rockstar created in Grand Theft Auto IV, has not this nice and certainly not this close to the historic reality of America in the '50's and earlier but it felt like something organic.

Empire Bay feels unfortunately artificial and it's only a background for the missions that the characters perform and for their inter gang warfare.

But it could be that, just as Rockstar commented on the nature of the American dream with Liberty City, 2K Czech is trying to comment on the nature of the gangster life itself with Mafia II.

It might be that the artificial flavor of the in game city aims to show the player how artificial and empty the life of Vito and his buddies.

And when I get fed up with driving around and shooting gangsters I will probably shift genres and play more of R.U.S.E., the World War II strategy game with a twist from Eugen Systems and Ubisoft.

I played the game when it was in open beta earlier in the year and, even if just multiplayer was available, I liked it a lot and thought it pushed the rather tired WW II strategy genre forward.

Now I plan to spend some time with the single player battles and maybe even engage in some computer skirmishes in order to prepare myself for some battles against human opponents.