Driven by his need for money and respect, Vito is encased in a series of ever-widening shells, each step up the mafia ladder (a ladder made of guns) giving a new set of faces to watch in cutscenes: but they're all congealed clichés, culled from a hundred Bronx Tales and Godfathers. The player's supporting cast eschews any chance to get really creative, instead furnishing the game with another layer of dark-suited, dark-haired professionals, hitmen and higher-ups that blur into one mass. Best buddy Joe occasionally dips a toe into 'comic relief' territory, but then ducks back into 'just a bit nasty' land, gets his pistol and shoots everyone in comic relief territory. From there on, he relies upon menace through the typical mafioso triple-threat: punching, shooting, and scary staring. Returning from a war he held no moral stake in – after a botched robbery, it was that or prison – he joins the local mafia, even though his mum told him not to. It's not that Vito is a sympathetic character. But after my AI target had pranged his own vehicle six times against anything and everything in his path, I realised that such forwardthinking wiseguyishness wasn't entirely necessary on my part. Dutifully I wrested against the vehicle's slightly clunky era-specific handling to try and keep pace. I only chose that car, snatched unattended with a bit of pavement minigame lockpicking, to satisfy the mission briefing, which said my mark would notice anything too obvious. As Mafia II's protagonist, my first attempt to trail the escaping mobster ended in failure after my original car choice – an inconspicuous '50s saloon – was outpaced with ease on the motorways. The other guy was me, and I was trying to be too wise. Had that guy done so, he'd have seen Sicilian-born WWII veteran and new-boy mobster Vito Scaletta about 20 feet behind, dressed in a red and white cod- Hawaiian shirt, driving a hot pink corvette with 'BUMS12' proudly displayed on the numberplate. It certainly doesn't fit the mid-level gangster the game asked me to tail early in its middle act, who didn't have the presence of mind to check his rearview mirror as he drove away from a literal hatchet job. 'Wiseguys', with its implied streetsmarts and cunning, doesn't fit Mafia II's mobsters. I've cross-referenced facts one and two with Mafia II, and they're definitely right – a lot of killing and a lot of suits.
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