Maybe in the final game we shall see some changes, but we’ll just have to wait and see.ĭespite what the screenshots on this page might be telling you on first glance, Mafia II actually renders in 720p (1280x720) on both platforms, with the blurriness found in some of the screens down to an additional blur filter being layered over parts of the image during the final stage of rendering.Īs per usual the 360 version of the game receives 2xMSAA (multisampling anti-aliasing), while the PS3 is left with no AA at all, which is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from most multiplatform conversions these days. But the problems are pretty distracting at times, and at the very least the game could have benefited from additional polish and optimisations before release.

Although after playing each demo for several hours this doesn’t always seem to be the case. It’s also these problems that at times really threaten to derail the experience - the feel that you are indeed part of a living, breathing 1950’s videogame world, and your enjoyment of that world. It’s this approach, which not only provides a genuinely immersive experience, but one that also causes the game no end of problems on both platforms. The world created here is huge and incredibly detailed, with not only high poly counts, but also lots of small intricate touches which really bring out the noticeable attention to detail that has gone into nearly every facet of the game’s visual make up. But unlike the with Red Dead Redemption, the game isn’t anywhere near as polished, with the developers attempting to cram in every last detail of the lead PC version onto the consoles with somewhat mixed results. Even when properly optimised, they still require a large memory footprint, not to mention a hefty chunk of GPU power - a commodity not quite as widely available as you might think given the Uncharted’s and Killzone’s of this world.

These types of games are rarely suited to the constrained nature of home console hardware specifications. Large, open-world, sandbox type affairs is where this kind of thing happens the most. All of these things not only impact on overall image quality but also take you firmly out of the lavish world the developers have tried so hard to create. The framerate often tends to suffer, texture detail gets scaled back, and sometimes the framebuffer resolution takes a massive dive. It is pretty commonplace to say that titles which feature much in the way of dense foliage, high levels of geometry and plenty of alpha-based transparency effects usually have serious issues with performance on consoles.

Mafia 2 demo