FlyinJ said:
What? I played it 5 times now, and realized there was absolutely no way I'd get to the last gas station on time and restarted each try.
So you're actually not supposed to be able to accomplish it? What crap design.
He explicitly says, "the more gas stations you get too, the more money you make." He does not say, "If you don't make it to all 6 gas stations, I will kill you." And it's definitely possible to get to all 6, I was about 20ft short of the last gas station and I got pulled over by a cop and was driving on PC, which I suck at.
There are actual several of these missions in the game where if you fail you just carry on with the consequences, and this one is the best explained one. For the rest of them, there is no way to know that it won't be gameover until it isn't. Those I think could be argued are poor design (although I like that you can fail and just live with it), but this one I thought they made it very clear you don't have to get to all of them, you'll just lose some money if you don't.
I just beat the game. I really liked it. But it is a 12 hour single player experience with no real reason to ever go back and play it again. Normally for me, that is either a rental or a pick up on sale item, but for some reason I got really hyped. I wouldn't say it's too short, I think the length is actually just right.
The narrative REALLY falls apart in places. All of a sudden your character will have these really strong feelings about someone when there's no background to explain it. I'm not a big mafia guy, just seen the Godfather movies, not Goodfellas or anything like that, so the story is probably a little less generic for me than it is for other people who are big into this stuff.
I REALLY enjoyed the shooting in this game on the PC with m/kb. I tried using the gamepad for a little bit, but even with autoaim turned on (and holy shit does this game have autoaim, it's basically MW2 level of automatic headshots), I still hated it. But mowing down guys with a tommy gun using the m/kb was pretty awesome.
Driving is fine, not excellent, not bad. You do a lot of it, probably too much of it, but for me I didn't mind because of the awesome soundtrack and the awesome city you are driving through, it makes the road trips a real treat.
The voice acting is incredibly. Some of the characters are wonderful (I really liked the two main ones), while others are pretty bland.
But the reason you play this game is for the city. It is far and away the best part. I never really understood the hyperbole written about Liberty City in GTAIV, but I feel like now I really understand what they meant. It's gorgeous (at least on PC anyway), and it's so full of life and unique details clearly placed their by creator intent, it really is something else. Definitely a must play just to experience the city, I've never seen anything like it in a video game before (and I did beat RDR, while RDR has some of this magic, after you're asked to rescue the guy's wife from being hung for the 10th time, the magic starts to wear off. Then again, RDR is a significantly bigger game). I remember getting hints of this in Mafia 1, and it really comes to fruition here.
If you can't play it on PC, definitely rent this game. If you can play it on PC, do so, but wait for it to go on sale, it's not worth $50.
