Players are free to walk, drive, and move all about the area with no artificial restriction, but the choices made there have realistic consequences. Most of the game plays out in a ten square-mile area, created from hundreds of photographs and illustrations of the era, in interactive detail worthy of Illusion Softwork's (now 2K Czech's) original setting of Lost Heaven - but in higher definition and greater intricacy.
Mafia II is set in Empire Bay, a fictional metropolis inspired primarily by New York and San Francisco, and influenced by other major American cities during the 1940s and early 1950s.
Coming a console-generation later, Mafia II presents a grittier, less linear, more personal adventure, but with the same goal of enveloping the player in a cinematic experience of action, violence, and storytelling. The original Mafia won a gangland of fans by combining the open-ended driving adventure and on-foot urban action of Grand Theft Auto III with a more tightly scripted story, set in a romanticized 1930s inspired by films and pulp fiction.
In a win-or-die-trying romp through America's happy days, Mafia II players vie for underworld ascendancy, in the role of a young thug who's willing to drive and shoot his way in and out of whatever trouble it takes to get the job done.
