izigame.me

Far from "definitive", in fact a very lazy and incompetent remaster. There were:

Consistent and heavy fps drops during gunfights--like from 60 to sub 20 at some points, indicating a chronic problem about either Nvidia Physx implementation or just poor optimization.
Horrendous NPC and companion path-finding, to the point of missions getting soft-locked or civilians running towards your car like they are suicidal or something.
An objective not progessing even after I completed it, soft-locking the game.
A floaty feeling combat almost making the entire thing feel RNG based.
Minimal but apparent traversal stutters (even when on not the highest settings).
Many small texture glitches like characters' hair and sometimes clothes disappearing, cars falling into and under the map or glitching inside other cars--mostly yours, etc.
The odd crash here and there.
And finally the single weirdest bug I've ever encountered in any game I played; after a while everything got "duplicated". Each time after I compeleted an objective the next one would show up twice on the upper left corner on the screen, all characters would repeat all their dialogue one after another, speaking over eachother and the most shocking part was I got double the rewards and it was a particularly big payout too. Not game-breaking and surprisingly positive but definitely immersion breaking for sure.

And these are the ones I bothered to take note of. What's even worse is, these issues are only the stuff I think were either caused by or obvious enough to be fixed during the remastering process, because there are many more and core issues with Mafia 2 itself, completely unrelated to the f*ck-ups of "Definitive" Edition. The ending for example was so sudden that it made me feel it was the ending solely because either 2K pulled the plug in the middle of development or developers/writers just ran out of ideas. On the other hand there were the many small mission design issues like; letting you take on a mission that requires at least a three passanger car with a two passenger sports car or taking away the car you bring to the mission away at the end of it, right before dropping you in the middle of nowhere where there are no cars in sight but I have to stop myself because I don't want to waste more of my time by listing every miniscule detail since the game did that thoroughly with its broken self but instead focus on the worst of the worst and by that I mean the side content.
I hope the original team of developers that designed the entirety of the side content and additionaly the team responsible for remastering said content and okay-ing it in its unchanged abhorrent state, recieved a multi-generational shadow ban from the industry right after the release of their work which made sure to leave the children of their children unable to find work in the industry so they couldn't/can't plague games with their clueless design philosophy. I just wanted to play a couple story missions consisting of what Joe was up to while Vito was in prison, that's it. What I got instead was a series of unending and unrelated high-score based, timed challenge missions disguised as Joe's "Adventures" but if anything it felt more like his personal hell. If you want to create an arcade mode, just do that. You want time trials? Okay but let me have my DLC "story" missions without having to constantly worry about how much time I have left to finish each mission. Honestly if that's what he went through, what happens him at the end of the main game is a blessing.
Right after rage-quitting that part of the side content--after that abysmal "Bomb Under the Seat" and at a whopping 50% completion, I reluctantly checked what the other stuff was offering and it was exactly the same; go to a marker on the map, read the mission description with concept art plastered in the background and continue with the same cycle of trial and error with timed challenge missions so I just quit the game then and there. As far as I'm concerned, Jimmy doesn't exist in the Mafia universe and can go f*ck himself for all I care.
So yeah, I don't think you should waste your time with Mafia 2 DE. It does a couple fascinating things here and there thus making all the technical problems it has sting even more, yet those problems had a complete chokehold over the good stuff I've experienced. Like, I haven't seen a game making the jump from one decade to another, almost completely changing the entire game like both visuals and mechanics-wise or how it decides to take its time and let the player enjoy certain parts of a story some other works similar in both tone and themes would rather skip with a lazy montage, both impressive stuff. However, not enough for me to recommend it, I never uninstalled a game faster. I would rather get my time spent raging on the broken parts of it back than to having played an okay story with a couple bright points here and there.