Well I have to say that out of all the gameplay oriented DLC I've ever encountered, the Mafia 2 ones have to be the worst.

A good way to describe it is to explain one mission, "Bomb Under The Seat"

It starts by driving to the floating mission marker and pressing the action button which brings up the one still image with the unvoiced mission briefing consisting of a single paragraph which essentailly says "deliver this car but be careful the guy I got it from was a bit shifty"; gee you don't think there might be a BOMB UNDER THE SEAT do you??

You click start and off you go, the mission timer (which is in every mission start to finish even when not important) comes up and starts counting down rather rapidly. You have a full block journey to get to the target car so you have to either run and waste a good 10% of the timer or jump in a car and avoid throngs of randomly generated pedestrians and traffic. You get to the car and jump in and get the surprise of your life (told in an unobtrusive text popup), there's a bomb under the seat, whoda thunk it?

This is is where the mission changes from meh to fucking abysmal.

For a start the bomb is a Speed style velocity based one on a 3 second timer, could they even DO that with 50s tech? I know nothing about cars so I'm going to be uncharacteristically generous and say it just SOUNDS like bullshit. As soon as you drop under 35mph you get a 3 second timer to get back over or you explode. You explode a LOT

Remember how I said there was random pedestrians? Well they line the footpath you have to drive over to even get on the road at the start, they aren't too responsive to the horn of the car and if you run them over, whoops a quarter of them are armed and ready to spray hot lead like a psychotic which usually ends up with you dead unless you can evade well enough to get out of range, either that or your jinking to avoid fire means you bump into something and explode. There's also randomly generated traffic which includes parked cars, in one of my 50+ attempts at this mission, I had a row of cars parked directly in front of the bomb car, in another there was a crash which blocked the road. I exploded. I failed the mission because of luck.

Finally getting past the obstacle course at the beginning I scream down the road with gathering speed and hit a 90 degree turn that goes uphill. Think about that for a moment, maintaining high speed, turning 90 degrees in a cramped space and then going uphill. Guess how many times I died there! Now add 20 or so. I finally managed to figure out the trick of curving between the building and the lampost to take the corner a bit faster and once I got that down, I got to the next corner which was another right agle uphill but with more space so it wasn't as bad, still had random traffic though so I bumped one and died. Getting back there yet again I got through the second right angle and got to the third which was a blind turn that you had to take at high speed and naturally I got clipped by a taxi during my turn and died.

I looked at the map and found there was 6-7 right angle turns and a grand total of 2 sections where you drive for more than 1 block without a hard turn but once I finally got on to them I could floor it and enjoy the luxury of not dying every 5 seconds. Or so I thought because the police are also randomly spawned and unusually attentive to speeding for some reason, they rammed me, knocked me into a lampost and I died. FINALLY I manage to navigate all that crap and get to the end point of the drive, its a tight 90 degree turn IMMEDIATELY followed by another tight 90 degree turn, you have to turn onto a street and then turn into a car yard right away, couldn't slow you down a little there could it? After a few dying a few times there I came up with the idea of just smashing through the wooden fence since it was the big obstacle. Nope, turns out its made of cast dwarf star metal that weighs as much as the moon, it just has a wood effect paintjob to look all rustic.

After a few more goes I manage to make it to the marker and hit the button to end the mission with what must have been nanoseconds to spare on the bomb timer and immediately swore that I'm never ever EVER trying that mission ever again and that I'll personally slap silly whichever brainless tool thought it was a good idea.

Oh yeah another fun fact? You get an autosave when you start a mission that takes you back to the mission marker when you die and you have to hit action to load the one frame briefing and wait for it to fade in fully before you can hit start, may only take 2-3 seconds but after 50 retries that really does get on your nerves, then you have to drive or run the block to get to the objective car again. As much as I hated the other parts of the mission, that one little part put it over the edge for me, why not have the fucking mission marker right next to the bomb car? What did the one block trip add to the mission? Who in the name of FUCK though this was a good design choice and can I please beat him with a stick?

Every single mission is on a timer, even ones where you have to do dull stuff like deliver a car and then go home, why does it matter how long you take to get home? They call it a bonus timer and you get more points the faster you do the mission, fair enough but when the timer runs out? Well you fail, apparently game progress is a bonus now.

Its also incredibly cheap. An earlier mission I did involved warning 3 guys that the cops were after them. Driving hell for leather across town I find the first guy with a floating arrow over his head, scream up and stop next to him, jumping out of the car to deliver a breathless warning: "Press END to warn guiseppe's friend". I press end and Joe just stands there. Nothing happens, I begin to think the key didn't register but then I noticed the arrow had vanished. Oh well, its just a glitch where the voice didn't play I thought and drove off to the next one who did the exact same thing as did the third, then I had to drive all the way back to guiseppe's place (whist still on a timer) to stand in the floating end mission icon and press end again. Not one word spoken through the entire fucking mission, they could have cut together a "Run, the cops are coming" line from joe's dialogue in the main game for fucks sake but they were too lazy even for that. Why would guiseppe need to know his mates were warned by an exact time? Perhaps he was scared and would commit suicide... Shame he couldn't take the DLC designers with him. I'd have called him but presumably in his fragile state joe thought he might need a hug.

The worst part is, Mafia 2 was great. Sure it wasn't the sequel that Mafia 1 deserved but it was a pretty damned good game and deserved fuckloads better than this shit DLC. The real killer is that the first mission of Joes Adventures was awesome, really interesting driving chase setpiece, good and inventive foot chase, unusual and cool stealth section with amusing overheard dialogue involving a cop being robbed by a transvestite, it was looking fantastic then it reverted to the lifeless 'put together by the intern over the weekend' bullshit that comprised jimmys vendetta

I paid 3 bucks for each of the DLCs in the recent steam sale and I still feel deeply ripped off

That reminds me of that racing part early in Mafia 1. God, I must have done that one 100 times until I finally clocked the fucker.

=\

I feel your pain, brother.

They actually fixed that after release; patched versions allow you to choose a difficulty for the race with the lowest one being really easy to win.

Haha really? Man, that bit was SO hard. Like, impossibly hard - it was a combination of super reflexes and pure luck that I managed to clock it AND that was with like, neck-to-neck finish. Never again.

The Mafia 2 DLC really is abysmal, and that comes from someone who loved and defends the main game. The timers, the cops everywhere because the action takes place in the city proper, the lack of story, the lack of any real design... it's just ugh. It makes me laugh at people who say it's cut content from the game... no it's not, it's rushed and barely paid attention to trash.

The first level of Joe's Adventures was good though. I thought after playing that level that Joe's Adventures would be a real expansion DLC and was excited. Then after that mission it became the same think as the terrible Jimmy DLC.

The weird thing is that the race in Mafia 1 was really piss easy as long as you kept your cool and stopped trying to play it like GTA3. They were released around the same time and every second post about mafia on the forum I was on at the time was bitching about the race, every single one was solved by one simple bit of advice: Slow down. All you need to do is corner carefully and then put power on in the straight and you win easily.You know the odd thing, I've found 3 missions that have proper story now and they also have pretty good (if unforgiving) design, voice work and checkpoints in logical places all followed by narrative cutscenes, almost like it was part of the main game. My suspicion is that they made part of the DLC and then outsourced it to pad out the length or get it done fast because it really does feel like it was made by 2 different groups

Bloody hell, it's worse than I was expecting. I heard some somewhat negative things about it so I decided to delay purchasing them until I'd decided whether I liked the full game enough to do so.

Well, I do like the main game. It has it's shortcomings - like the total lack of Free Ride - but generally speaking it's a fine game. Luckily that offer expired before I had any chance to do anything about it.

Yeah, I finished Joe's Adventures and there are a few more missions like the first one, but they aren't as long or as good as the start in my opinion. I do wish you could just do the 4-5 real Joe missions though, without the bullshit filler.

Grunt, the racing mission in Mafia 1... I love that game but still am not completely amazing at the driving bits and even doing the whole switching cars bit in the set amount of time drove me crazy. :P I finally decided when I do get back to the game I'm just going to save myself the headache and find a post race save so I can keep going on with the game.

Killed it for me. Games in the GTA style really shine when they allow you to simply dick about and have fun. What's the point of making a living breathing city if you can't do anything other than missions in it? GTA IV annoyed me with the constant friend phone calls when I was having fun seeing how many cops I could blow up or just wandering around trying to find pidgeons or hidden jumps. Luckly it's no where near as bad in Episodes from LC.

You can just ignore the missions and dick around in Mafia 2 as much as you want. You can even choose which completed chapter to start again, allowing you to dick around in different time periods. Also in GTA4 you could completely ignore phone calls from friends.

Yeah but there aren't any things to actually do in Mafia 2. GTA has hidden packages/pidgeons, races, stunt jumps, vigilante, manhunt, random characters, drug deliveries, car jacking etc. There is far more to do in Liberty City than there is in most full games.

Yeah I know you can ignore the phone but don't you piss your friends off if you don't answer? At least in Ballad/LaD they wait till you call them.

Yeah, the constant phone calls helped to put me off the game too. It was trying too hard to fight its roots when it should have been embracing them.
It's just not the same. Not at all in fact.

Jimmy is shit, Joe is decent DLC. 4 really good missions, the first one is really great. The rest is filler, but still mostly fun. I had to repeat this Bomb mission few times before I suceeded, yeah.

I actually finished Mafia 2 story for a second time today, on hard now. It is a great game, but it is huge shame so much content got cut, there was potential for GOTY in there.

This kinda reminds me of the driving in Alone in the Dark 2008. That was some awful driving controls. Music was awesome, though.