Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game, the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech, previously known as Illusion Softworks, and is published by 2K Games.[5] Originally announced in August 2007 at the Leipzig Games Convention, it was released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows in August 2010

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will work with 3 different families the Clemente, Falcone, and Vinci crime families and eventually rise to become a made man. There are 15 chapters in the game, integrated into one storyline.

The game contains two hours of in-game cutscenes. The original game, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, had a screenplay of 400 pages, compared to the 700 pages of the sequel. Daniel Vávra, the writer and director of the original and the sequel, discussed the new angle of the game stating: "The old game was a tribute to gangster films, a romantic vision. Mafia II is grittier, real, a darker world, and the effects are based in reality." Official PlayStation Magazine states: "A high body count is still promised in this tale set in a fictional city 'inspired by' New York of the 1940s and '50s, but those casualties will come the hard way — through small-scale operations rather than mass firefights.

 Reference to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven

In the original game the main protagonist Thomas Angelo is shown to be gunned down at the end of the game in front of his house. It is revealed in Chapter 14: Stairway to Heaven in Mafia 2 that Vito and Joe are the two who "whack" him. This is further proven by the use of the exact same red car in both cases and nearly identical cut scenes, although the dialogue used is the same from the original scene. The cut scene uses the same voice actor for Thomas Angelo as in the original game, Michael Sorvino.