This DLC is absolutely disappointing.
I always wanted to play it since I thought the story would relate to the main storyline of the game, just as they advertised it The truth is: It doesn't. It's just a collection of missions you complete playing as Joe Barbaro. These missions are absolutely terrible in game design. You kill people, steal cars and kill people and steal cars at the same time sometimes. That's it. That's the whole DLC. There are not even cutscenes, the missions and their objectives are presented as texts. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TEXTS. This way, the developers made sure that no kind of tension or atmosphere comes up during your playthrough. The damn main game aspires to be similar to a movie, as the presentation and the story are the most important parts of the game, and this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ DLC doesn't even get cutscenes? How the ♥♥♥♥ was this supposed to work anyway? You take the best parts of the game away and let us suckers play some missions any monkey could have done in a GTA SA mission editor? Who was responsible for this? No wonder Mafia 3 was a boring and monotonous chore. These guys don't give a ♥♥♥♥ about their game, all they want is money.


To make my point clear, I want to explain in five points why the missions are whole game and specially this DLC is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.


Number one: In one of the missions your partner tells you that "it'll go a lot smoother if you do it nice and quiet", when stealth is literally not possible. You can't even get past the first guard without alerting all the others. At the start of this very same mission, the game indicates how to equip handgrenades. How the hell does something like this get past the developers? They didn't even put enough effort into the game to actually know what they wanted it to be.


Number two: there are huge logical flaws in the way these missions are started. For example, in of the missions a friend of you tells you that he messed with some bad guys and is now hiding in a subway station. How the hell did he contact you? ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mobile phones in the 40s? Did any of the developers think about this for more than 20 seconds? All the other missions are not started at the location of the guy who gives you the mission, but near the place where you will need to do something in the mission. How exactly does Joe know where to go before he even spoke to the one giving him a mission? This does not make any sense at all.

Number three: In numerous missions, the spawns (and therefore placement) of enemies is horrid. You need to follow a person and kill his whole gang. So first you need to follow him (which takes way too long because he always turns around for no reason at all) to his car, then steal an own car and follow him (but you need to take another way out of the car park, because a truck blocks the exit he took for no reason at all and you fail the mission if looking for another way out takes you too long). After restarting the mission at least once, you finally follow this guy to his gang's hideout. What happens? All of the guys are behind a corner, except for one, who's up on a balcony or something of that sort. He starts shooting at you and if you don't realize where he is, then you are dead and need to replay the whole mission.


Number four: The bad mission design is made even worse by the fact that the missions are not rewarding at all, even though you get a lot of money for completing them. Some of the mid-to-end-game missions are rewarded with up to 3000$. But here's the problem: You can not buy anything significant in the game. You can buy suits, ammo for your guns and upgrades for cars. The prices of guns, ammo and suits are very low, so you will never run into any financial problems. Car tuning is more expensive, but the most you can spend on one car is 1000-1400$ or something along these lines. There are 44 (45 including Joe's Adventures because it has a bonus car) in the game, so you could theoretically spend all your money into this tuning. Once again, this wouldn't make much sense because there are only 12 types of wheels, 20 paint jobs in the 1940s (so in the DLC only 20), 20 colors in the 1950s part of the game and two engine upgrades for every car. It is actually nice to paint cars with a primary and secondary color and the engine upgrades make many cars more fun to drive, but given the lack of content, it gets boring quite quickly.


Number five: The shooting in the game works alright, but there is no tactical variety in the shootouts: You hide behind a corner, put out your head for a second, shoot one or two guys, then get back behind your cover and repeat this over and over.


I can't stop at this point, "Joe's Adventures" is just the epitome of everything wrong with Mafia 2. There was so much more potential in this game and the whole franchise. It could have been up there next to the big ones Grand Theft Auto. They had it all in their hands: Great driving physics, a nice looking world, good shooting mechanics and an awesome idea. It is baffling how the developers didn't see what this game could have been. They didn't even try to copy their rivals regarding a vivid open world and side activities. Anyone who has ever played GTA could have come up with better ways to fill the world and add sandbox activities, because the developers didn't even bother to think of anything at all.
Don't buy this DLC. Don't give 2K any more money. Don't support the abysmal mind set of the developers and publishers which led to this disaster.