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This isn't like GTA, in which you can race along at whatever speed you want as long as you don't careen headfirst into the oncoming cops—Mafia II makes you adhere to traffic regulations. Characters called me crazy for skipping red lights, and the game even has a speed limiter that I've kept active most of the time, anything to keep the cops off my tail. Hell, missions often require you to literally perform in-game menial labor—whether it's packing boxes, cleaning floors, or whatever else. This world is not yours for the taking—it's bigger than you as a player and utterly indifferent toward your presence. You've just got to get through it. Everyone's gotta pull together for the common cause, right? There's a war on.The question you're probably asking yourself at this point is this: How is any of this compelling to actually play? The answer is fairly simple: The mechanics of the gameplay perfectly line up with the ambitions of the character. It's thematically coherent, which is something that so many gangster games seem to put to the wayside in their attempts to make the player feel important. This game isn't about opening up the possibilities of the world to the player—it's about very deliberately closing them off. It makes you relate to the character's struggles in a way that simply would not be possible if the mob was seen as this conquerable force that Vito simply needed to overcome.Most of us can't relate to being a well-respected Mafioso. What we can relate to, however, is the need to get up in the morning in order to go to a shitty job. I don't want to do it, but we've all got to get by, right? That's Vito's predicament in a nutshell—and that's why Mafia II spoke to me on a level that no other gangster game has done before.Follow Hamish Black on Twitter.