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Mafia 2 is a story you go through once. Vito Scaletta's rise runs to fifteen numbered chapters, several of them ending with him back at an apartment restoring his health and going to sleep, and at least one collectible our guides document will not come back for you once you have walked out of the room it sits in. That shapes everything on this page: what the game asks of you chapter by chapter, what a single pass can quietly lose, and, because the PC version ships with a physics engine that fights certain graphics cards, what has to be settled before the first chapter will even load.
How Many Chapters Mafia 2 Has
Fifteen, running from The Old Country to Per Aspera Ad Astra. They are not interchangeable missions. Some are shooting galleries, two turn on staying quiet enough not to trip an alarm, several are driving set pieces, and one is a stretch of shopping and cutscenes with nothing risky in it at all. Knowing which is which is the difference between arriving at the distillery with the right gun and arriving at it with a pistol.
| # | Chapter | What it is mostly made of |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Old Country | Shooting tutorial in the past-story opening, then holding a machine gun position until a tank arrives |
| 2 | Home Sweet Home | The combat tutorial, pin lock training, a first stolen car and a low-level police chase |
| 3 | Enemy of the State | A silent infiltration of the federal building, then a delivery run to at least six of the eight gas stations |
| 4 | Murphy's Law | A store robbery, a rooftop exchange with police and a serious chase away from it |
| 5 | The Buzzsaw | A four-floor assault on the distillery, then escorting the wounded Henry to a doctor |
| 6 | Time Well Spent | Prison. Cutscenes and fist fights, no guns |
| 7 | In Loving Memory of Francesco Potenza | Release, a new apartment and some shopping. Nothing hostile |
| 8 | The Wild One's | Selling cigarettes around the city, a Molotov job, then a long firefight at the foundry |
| 9 | Balls & Beans | A timed pursuit of Luca, the sewer system, quiet movement and a bare-knuckle fight |
| 10 | Room Service | A disguise, a rooftop gunfight, a car chase, and then a body to dispose of |
| 11 | A Friend of Ours | A run of errands, a night ambush to escape from, and the bar |
| 12 | Sea Gift | A pickup, an ambush on the way back and a delivery drive |
| 13 | Exit The Dragon | Tailing Wong at a fixed distance, firing upward at covered enemies, then changing clothes to shed the heat |
| 14 | Stairway to Heaven | The fight for Derek, which runs with no checkpoints, followed by raising money |
| 15 | Per Aspera Ad Astra | The observatory. One long shootout and Carlo |
Our complete Mafia 2 walkthrough takes each of those in turn with the specifics: which enemies to leave in cover, where the crosshair colour matters, why cops with shotguns should never be approached at close range, and the handful of moments where being careless costs you a restart rather than health.
What A Single Pass Can Lose
Two collections are scattered through Empire Bay and they behave completely differently. The 159 wanted posters are pasted on walls across nineteen districts and stay exactly where they are, so they can be swept at any point, in any order, by whoever feels like driving. The 50 Playboy magazines are filed by chapter, and a couple of them sit in rooms the story burns down or locks behind you.
That asymmetry is the whole of our Mafia 2 collectibles guide, which lays out how many magazines each chapter holds, which districts owe you the most posters, and the two magazines our location guide specifically warns you not to leave behind. If you only read one thing on this site before starting a fresh save, read the chapter table on that page.
Getting It Running On PC First
The PC version has a well-documented history of black screens, black lines, missing cutscene audio and framerate collapses, and the two culprits that come up most often across our troubleshooting list are the resolution it decides to launch at and the PhysX APEX effects it ships with. The useful way to work through it is by how far into the game you have to reach, starting with the changes you can undo in a second and stopping before you need anything you did not install yourself.
The shallowest fixes never leave the menus. Running windowed clears a family of ATI graphics glitches outright, and turning everything to minimum then working upward is the standard way to find which setting your card objects to. One step down, drivers do a surprising amount of work: unreadable text and black textures in 3D Vision want the NVIDIA 3D drivers on top of your card drivers, silent cutscenes want a sound driver update, and a game that refuses to launch at all wants driver and DirectX updates, the specified PhysX version, compatibility mode as an administrator and a Steam integrity check before anything more exotic.
Below that you are editing a file the game wrote. The classic startup failure, where you hear the game loading behind a black screen or a monitor reading "mode not supported", is fixed in the videoconfig file under your local 2K Games save folder, either by zeroing the values or by typing in your desktop's native resolution. There is also a keyboard-only route through the blind menus to force 640x480 and climb back up from there, which is worth knowing because it needs no file editing at all. All of these, plus the brightness bug, the Steam installation stall and the monitor settings that survive a crash, are collected in our Mafia 2 troubleshooting guide.
The deepest fix deletes things the game shipped with. APEX clothing simulation is what drains video memory on medium and high, and removing it is a graded choice rather than an on or off switch: drop the whole Cloth folder for the biggest framerate gain, or keep it and delete everything inside it except Vito's own files and two shared ones, so that he alone keeps dynamic clothing while the crowd goes static. The Effects folder goes the same way, and individual .aea files can be pulled one at a time if you would rather lose tyre smoke than car explosions. Our PhysX APEX clothing tweak guide walks each tier and, sensibly, tells you to try the game's own PhysX version before you start deleting anything.
Driving It With A Wheel
Empire Bay is a city you spend a lot of the fifteen chapters driving across, in icy weather in the early chapters and in pursuit or flight through a run of the later ones, and the route to a wheel our guide documents goes through an emulator rather than a settings screen. x360ce presents your wheel to the game as a controller, which means finding your device's VID and PID in Device Manager and writing them into the ini by hand. Our Mafia 2 steering wheel setup guide covers the eight steps for a G25 or G27, including the pad block you need to replace wholesale and the flag that has to flip from 0 to 1 before any of it takes.
After The Credits
Free Ride is where the city stops being a corridor between missions, and it is also where the game's weather becomes something you can dictate rather than wait for. There are two ways in. The file swap is crude and permanent: rename the Free Ride sky file, copy one of the numbered sky files over it, and that is the weather you get. The console route is live and reversible, running an injector alongside the game so you can alt-tab out and type a time of day or a weather template in mid-session. Our rain, snow and night mode tweak guide lists both, with the warning that the console commands are case sensitive and that a modified executable stops the whole thing working.
Mafia 2 Questions We Get Asked
How many chapters are in Mafia 2? Fifteen, numbered and named, ending at Per Aspera Ad Astra in the observatory. Our walkthrough covers all of them in order.
How long does it take? We do not put a clock on it, because the honest answer depends entirely on whether you are collecting. A pass that ignores both sets is fifteen chapters of fairly linear work; a pass that clears 159 posters spread over nineteen districts is a different game with a lot of driving in it.
Is anything missable? Among the things we document, yes, and only on the magazine side. Our location guide flags two specific finds that a chapter takes away from you, and it is explicit that restarting will not bring one of them back. The posters carry no such warning anywhere in the list.
Is the PhysX slowdown fixable without a new card? Usually. The APEX clothing simulation is the single biggest drain, and it can be removed in stages rather than all at once. ATI owners have the worst of it because the PhysX work lands on the processor instead of the graphics card, which is why turning PhysX off entirely is a legitimate answer on older hardware rather than a defeat.