Jimmy’s Vendetta is not related to the main plot of Mafia II in anyway, so you’ll never come across any of the familiar characters from the story. You play Jimmy, a former mob hitman, who gets cheated and is sent to prison. After spending a good amount of time in the slammer, there’s only one thing on your mind and that’s revenge.
The game opens up with a cut scene showing your former days of glory and how you get captured and thrown in the hole. Fast forward to the present, a riot has broken in the prison and this is your only chance to break out. Unlike Mafia II, this DLC has more of an arcade characteristic to it, so after each mission you are graded on how fast you completed it or how many people you killed. Points are also added for speeding and power slides. After finishing a mission you can replay it at any time to better your score.
Since this game is all about taking revenge on the people that ruined your life, there are plenty of shootouts and assassinations in every mission. If you ever think you’re outnumbered and need some help, there’s a little trick you can try that works very well. Let’s say there is a huge gang coming at you with Tommy guns and you find yourself low on ammo. Just be patient and let them keep shooting at you but don’t return fire. Sooner or later the cops will arrive and take them out. All you do is sit at a distance and watch the show.
Unfortunately, the variety of missions is very less and it basically just boils down to three or four different types. One is to go and kill a bunch of people, destroy cars, steal vehicles and deliver them and that’s pretty much it. As you progress the difficulty increases a bit; like there’ll be more number of people to kill or when you steal the car, the cops will be alerted, plus there’ll be some mob guys protecting the car, etc. After playing five or six missions, it gets boring and repetitive. Also, the missions are scattered all over the map, so there’s a lot of painful driving to do.
The graphics are the same although you do get some new cars to drive that aren’t in the main story. Another thing you’ll notice is that there aren’t any cut scenes apart from the intro and the last couple of missions. The rest just have static picture giving you a little brief on what the mission is all about and why you’re doing this before you start. Once you’re done, you just go to a save point, which is now a floating symbol of a house that appears close to your location, so now you at least don’t have to drive all the way to the safe house to save your game. There comes a point where you just don’t care about Jimmy or anything else, as there isn’t much of a story as you just go around killing people, saving your game, rinse and repeat.
This DLC pack should have been included with Mafia II for free as there’s nothing really new here, certainly nothing worth $10. It’s as if 2K Games had anticipated the angry reaction of gamers about the story being too short and quickly released this to hush things. Let’s face it, Mafia II is a good game but we felt a bit short-changed because after the main story there’s really nothing much to do with very little replay value. Jimmy’s Vendetta is fun to play but lacks variety and after a couple of missions you get bored. We say give this a skip, in fact buy the first game if you haven’t played it, it will be money well spent.
Overview: Mafia II DLC: Jimmy’s Vendetta
Good graphics, plenty of gun fights and car chases, new vehicles addedMissions lack variety and get boring after a while
Get’s repetitive after sometime, bland story, should have been free
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IE9’s interface – click for full size view
If I could have one final nitpick, it’s the logo. What were Microsoft thinking? It’s never been particularly imaginative, but the new toy-town version isn’t any better!
