Mafia II Performance on Dell Inspiron 15R N5010

I am now testing this laptop with Mafia II and it is running very nice. Although I couldn’t crank every setting high, even at medium, the game works awesome and is fun to play. So, let’s hear more of it.

After playing GTA IV on Inspiron 15R on medium settings and satisfied with my purchase, I played many games. But I could not get them running fine on highest settings, because you know; ATI Radeon 5470 is not for high-end games. I am just happy that it is able to handle all latest games, including Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Crysis Warhead, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, James Bond 007 Blood Stone, NFS World etc.

Now about Mafia II on ATI Radeon 5470:

Benchmarks: There is an in-game benchmarking tool just like GTA IV. But unlike GTA IV, the tool in Mafia II runs for quite long and ultimately you get bored and hit ESC. You don’t have to wait for the stats here, system information (like processor and graphics card) is listed on top left of the screen and current frames per second plus average frames per second are on the top right corner of the screen.

I didn’t use FRAPS because I knew that I’d get the same results.

Gameplay

I purchased this game because I heard so much about how GTA was influenced by Mafia and became hugely popular. Now when I am playing Mafia II, I am not feeling that much excitement. For one thing, Mafia is based on old age gangster while GTA paces with every year.

Both games are very different yet the same in many aspects. Like doing odd jobs to earn more money, The American Dream, killing the same person with whom you once worked and things like that.

So, let me review this game based on first 2 hours of gameplay. So, please consider this as spoiler and be careful.

Starting Out

The protagonist, Vito, isn’t like Niko Bellic (I am sorry but I just have to compare both of them). Niko Bellic fled from being an army man, while, Vito had to work in army when he got busted in America and moved to Sicily to fight in a war from America’s side.

All of this is not in just video, we actually fight as a soldier and that’s when Call of Duty comes to my mind (and Bad Company).

Then, after playing our first mission as a soldier, we head back to America and find that everything has gone to dust. We start doing odd jobs in order to pay the debt that Vito’s father took form Lone Sharks in order to live better.

Carjacking is different from GTA IV’s. Though we can break the glass and take the car away, if we don’t want to spoil those hot cars, we can actually pick locks and drive away with style. In GTA IV, no matter what we wanted, we had to break the glass and then hotwire.

We cannot drive cars in Mafia II right away. We have to finish first two missions and then, our old friend Joe lets us drive his car. After that we can drive pretty much anything.

Cars feel very odd and hard to steer. May be it’s because they are vintage cars or something. But after playing Shift, Hot Pursuit 2 and GT 5, I began to despise cars in Mafia II. Anyway, that’s just my opinion, you might like them.

Escaping from Police in Mafia II works the same way as it did in GTA IV. You need to get out of the range and you’ll be fine. However, unlike GTA IV, where you could drive the same car around police (after you cool down), you have to change the name plate or color to legalize your car.

Weapon system is nice and pretty much same as all other shooting games. You get in cover and kill your enemies.

This game is fun to play and I think that I can deal with those vintage cars. Let me know about your impressions on the game.