Made some more progress in MAFIA 2. The checkpointing doesn't seem to be as generous as it was in Mafia: Definitive edition or maybe I'm just dying more on certain missions then Mafia: Definitive edition so I'm noticing it because there's a couple bits where it feels like I have to redo large parts of a mission when I die.
Otherwise it feels like a slower burn then Mafia: DE. Tommy seemed to go from cab driver to trusted Caporegime(I think that's what he was meant to be in the Salieri family, though he got attend meetings ) pretty quickly, whereas I'm like 4+ hours in and Vito hasn't officially joined the mob yet. Rather he seems to be just doing contract jobs for the actual mobsters as a soldier, which does put a different spin on the whole thing for sure. It also seems like Tommy made out a lot better then Vito is, because Vito really doesn't seem to gain much from his life of crime. Rather, what little he gains over the early game from jobs just vanishes when he goes to prison. Maybe later Vito will live "The good life" but so far there doesn't seem to much reward for his efforts unlike a lot of other crime games.
There's also a bit where he's leaving his apartment and immediately gets arrested for a crime he pulled a few missions earlier and after a brief courtroom cutscene gets sent to federal prison on a 10 year sentence. The next chapter is about an hour of him being playable in prison, which is mostly him doing whatever the guards tell him to do and getting into fights. It drags on for what feels like forever which I guess is a pretty decent way of simulating being in prison for real in a videogame. It also reminded me of Conner getting thrown in Prison in Assassins Creed 3, though it works better here due to the crime genre, whereas AC3 just felt weirdly out of place for the game.
Also interesting the amount of casual racism the game depicts, which I guess is very accurate for the time period but most of the time that kind of thing is glossed over in media based in the 1940's and 1950's. During an early chapter you're told to go steal a nice car in a different part of the city. On the way there Joe starts going off about how awful the people are there and uses some pretty nasty archaic slurs, which probably won't be recognizable for a lot of people. Then you get there and realize it's a African American neighborhood and even when you steal the car, the police don't respond. The police apparently just do not fucking care that a white guy stole a black persons car in a black neighborhood and yeah...that sounds disturbingly accurate for the time and place.
