Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of mob stories. I have no deep love for The Godfather (although I do think it’s an excellently made movie), Goodfellas, the Sopranos, or any other cultural touchstones involving the mob. I’m not sure why, I mean growing up Philadelphia was in the process of breaking up the Italian mafia and it was constantly in the news either because of this or because they were fighting with themselves. There was even a hit at a local pizza place not too far from my parent’s house that I clearly remember (I wasn’t there but I remember the news coverage). Anyway, long story short, I don’t care about the mob.
My history with the Mafia series is as such. Years ago, I played a game I thought was Mafia, I didn’t like it. When Mafia III was released, I thought it looked cool so I played it and generally liked it. It was New Orleans 60s/70s GTA. Because of my past experience with the series though, I had no desire to go back and retry the series. Then Mafia: Definitive Edition was announced and the game looked beautiful and modern. Thus here we are.
Turns out that game I played and didn’t like, wasn’t Mafia. It was a similar concept (open world, organized crime) in a similar time period (20s and 30s) but it wasn’t the game that Mafia: Definitive Edition has remade. I know this because evidently I owned the original Mafia on Steam and I loaded it up and the intro is the same in both but not what I remember from the game that made me not like the Mafia series. So, guess what? Mafia: Definitive Edition is pretty good but it’s very much from a different era of games.
Mafia and Grand Theft Auto III are contemporaries and it is hard to not compare the two head to head. Both are open world crime games but they each take a different approach to delivering their game. Where GTA III is truly open world, Mafia is level based but those levels (missions) take place in an open world. You have little reason to deviate from, and in some cases can’t deviate from, the narrative mission in this game. Because of this, Mafia’s narrative is delivered better but the game rarely feels like a true open world experience.
Due to the way the game is structured, I never got to learn the city of Lost Heaven like I do in true open world games. This isn’t necessarily an issue though and I do appreciate the more structured nature of the game as opposed to the free-for-all of activities that GTA can be. It respects my time more but also doesn’t really offer the playground experience that GTA does. Different games for different moods and all that.
The story is much more focused than it was in GTA III. Yes, the Definitive Edition has remade the game but from my comparison on Steam to this version, DE is a straight remake with little changed. And while I don’t really like mob stories, this one was pretty solid. It is all told in flashback as Tommy, our main character, is relaying his story to a cop so as to take down the mob in Lost Heaven. The characters have depth and are likeable, much more than most of the characters in GTA games.
The missions are pretty much what you’d expect with lots of driving and lots of shooting. It’s nothing special but it works pretty well. Three things that did stand out to me though were that the game is pretty brutal in its difficulty. Tommy doesn’t take getting shot very well and the AI is pretty accurate. With the health system being old school, in that you need to get health packs to restore lost health, I quickly got tired of the combat difficulty so I lowered it to easy. The second thing was the use of scripted set pieces, in open world games we’ve mostly come to expect that things just kind of happen but because Mafia is so narrative focused and how that narrative is delivered relies on certain things happening, the set pieces are necessary. And they work really well too and look great. And finally, while the mission structure doesn’t take full advantage of the open world, I loved that the cops in the game would/could track you down for illegal driving/activities and give you a ticket or arrest you. Having to actually watch your speed (of which there is a nice limiter you can apply) is actually the weird kind of goofy realism I’m here for.
Overall, I’m down with Mafia: Definitive Edition. It looks great, has a cool setting that we don’t see much in games, and it plays good enough. It’s budget priced and while not AAA by today’s standard, it’s quite enjoyable.
4*
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