Mafia II

Vito's voiceover reminds us to stop ogling and hit the streets, so it's down to the garage to select a ride. Although the cars aren't licensed, they're still absolutely recognisable as a Cadillac saloon, a Ford Thunderbird coupé and an Austin-Healey roadster. Each has detailed stats and a tuning level, indicating that your car collection can be modified over time.

On Empire Bay's relatively busy roads, the cars handle with satisfying heft and character, wallowing on soft suspension and gently sliding their tails out. Whether or not you use that speed limiter button will be a matter of personal taste, but it's quite likely you will, for a couple of reasons. First, there is plenty to sit back and enjoy in the game's sights and sounds, not least the excellent radio soundtrack of doo-wop and early R&B by the likes of Screamin' Jay Hawkins.

Second, the comic mayhem of open-world tradition simply isn't appropriate to the hard-won realism of Mafia II's world. There will definitely be times when you need to get somewhere in a hurry, but getting involved in wacky races on the way from A to B would break the illusion - and the cops are pretty punishing.

Even though they've been toned down for the purposes of this demo, I still end up having to bribe my way out of an arrest for speeding, and cars sustain quite a lot of damage in scrapes. They can be fully repaired at garages, or you can coax a conked-out motor back to life (just) by doing a little DIY roadside repair.

Vito hooks up with Joe to help him sell smokes from the back of a flat-bed truck, painstakingly picking the right brand for customers using Mafia II's rather finicky contextual button-prompts. They're rudely interrupted by the greasers, who shut down their cigarette scam by setting the truck on fire. (Mafia II's sparing use of swearing is notable: where most game scripts either avoid it it altogether or throw the f-word around liberally enough to make Quentin Tarantino blush, the single cuss I hear in an hour's play - a strong, Oedipal one - is almost shocking.)

Mafia II has its boots firmly on the ground, then, and that's even more apparent when we get to the real meat of the action at the end of the mission. Losing the greasers in a car chase, Vito calls local boss Eddie for backup from a phone booth, and they assemble a small squad of mafiosi to exact revenge. After shooting up the punks' favourite diner and torching it with Molotovs, the mobsters engage them in a taut, intense gun battle on a shabby industrial real estate.

Unlike the exuberant action favoured by many open-world games, Mafia II offers demanding and deadly third-person shooting in which cautious advancement and constant use of cover are key. Even though Vito has lots of friendly AI assistance in this mission, just a few moments' exposure will easily finish him off. Aiming is rather deliberate but the feedback from the guns is good, the level layout and enemy attack patterns get more involved over the course of the battle, and there are some beautifully-animated vignettes and set-pieces to punctuate it. It's almost touching when one fleeing punk hesitates for a second over a fallen comrade.

2K Czech is just as serious about shooting as it is about licensing old issues of Playboy and researching fifties butter brands, it turns out. It's maybe a little too serious - the difficulty isn't unwelcome, but the yawning gaps between checkpoints can be pretty frustrating with action that's as methodical and linear as this.

I'm repeating one lengthy section for the fifth time when my play session ends, so those Wild Ones will have to go unpunished for now. But then if that's the price we have to pay for an open-world crime game as refreshingly grounded, grown-up and solidly rooted in a recognisable real world as this, then it could well be worth it.