Mafia II: Jimmy's Vendetta kicks off fifteen years after the ending of the PlayStation 3 exclusive downloadable episode
The Betrayal of Jimmy. This episode opens with the titular cleaner rotting away in a jail cell, having been cruelly sold out by his mob bosses. The only thing that keeps him going is his plans for vengeance. When a riot breaks out, Jimmy sees an opportunity to escape. The opening mission leaves a great first impression; it's a good old-fashioned brawl-a-thon. Once you get out, however, things take a major turn for the worse. Not for Jimmy, but for the gameplay in general.
If you played Mafia II, what did the game get right above everything else? If you think 2K Czech's story is the star, I agree. Jimmy's Vendetta has almost no narrative driving the action. Save for a few cutscenes and some brief text-based briefings, there's hardly any context for all the random missions. Ultimately, that's the meat of Jimmy's Vendetta: random missions. As Jimmy, you'll drive around Empire Bay doing odd jobs for powerful people. You'll wreck up businesses who aren't paying their protection money, kill people who have been marked for death, steal vehicles, and more. The missions aren't bad on their own, but there's a catch: I'll explain it later. Late in Mafia II, I noticed that driving around Empire Bay was starting to get really boring. What kept it from being too boring in Mafia II was the fact that Vito almost always had someone else in the car who was always ready to speak his mind. Jimmy's Vendetta takes the focus off of the characters and the storytelling, and that's the biggest contributing factor to its failure.
