It’s nice to be taken back to simpler times. Be reminded of what the world was once like before all of it went to hell. When you were at home watching your favorite television program before dear mama called you for supper. When you can simply walk to the grocery store instead of waiting in thirty minutes worth of traffic. When you didn't have to sell your kidneys just so you can pay off a month of rent. Times have changed, and with it video games have changed as well. Back in the day an open world sandbox was impressive. Having a fully explorable world to go venture through, exciting events to witness in said world, and individuals naturally navigate that world as if they were always there. Open world games were majestic, but as of recently the genre has become oversaturated and tiresome. Every company is making open world games now, even Nintendo is hopping onto the open world bandwagon with titles like Pikmin 4 and the two most recent Legend of Zelda games. Modern open worlds seem to always follow specific staples. List of side activities, camps to clear out, towers to scale, and much more. It’s all become tiresome and apparently the way devs fix the repetition is by adding more. In reality all that does is make the problem worse and your open world more bloated. I miss simplistic open world games.
That’s why I’ve been checking out older games recently, and one of them is a remake of one of the oldest open world titles out there. Mafia: Definitive Edition, the 2020 reimagining that aims to bring Mafia to a new light. The original Mafia was a game made in response to the ever rising popularity of Grand Theft Auto. The third GTA came out a year before, hit the world by storm, and was a technical marvel at the time. Dozens of developers wanted to take influence, and so came along Illusion Softworks who made Mafia. It didn’t blow up in the same way as GTA 3, but it was one of few Grand Theft Auto imitators that stood out mainly for its graphics and stellar storytelling. The world was visually striking, the animation was impressive, and the tale followed a mobster rising up in the ranks only to realize the crime life was too much to handle. It’s a game packed full of emotion and wit, and some even considered Mafia to have a better narrative than the Grand Theft Auto games. It quickly rose to being a classic and seven years after it was released it managed to be a sequel, and another one six years after. Mafia is special for a lot of people, but twenty years have passed since the original game came out. A lot has improved with games and Mafia has begun to show its age mainly in terms of its gameplay and difficulty.
Illusion Softworks was bought out by 2K Games a few years before Mafia 2 came out, and soon enough they no longer had full control over the franchise they had created. Only assisting in the development of Mafia 3 which is considered the worst in the franchise and being fully absorbed. The team at Illusion are no more, but that doesn’t mean Mafia is gone forever. After the disaster that was Mafia 3 the crew at Hangar 13, the current devs of Mafia, decided to begin reworking the older games for modern hardware. Mafia 2 was more of a port, but when it came to rework the original they decided to redo it from the ground up. A full on remake, which is fitting. If you are gonna remake a game then give it to the games that are more than 15 years old and have aged poorly in terms of gameplay. Mafia would be remade using the exact engine Mafia 3 used and have aspects of the difficulty toned down so that more people would be capable of finishing the story.It was planned to release a few months after Mafia 2: Definitive Edition, but then a disaster occurs. Mafia 2: Definitive Edition was loaded with bugs, barely playable, and considered one of the worst games to have come out in 2020. Mafia 2 was considered a fan favorite, and shocked a lot of people since it only came out one console generation ago. It shouldn’t have been difficult to port yet it was and it brought down hype for the original Mafia’s remake.
The Mafia remake, titled Mafia: Definitive Edition, comes out and doesn’t meet the sales 2K had hoped for. It underperformed, but beneath the disaster was a fairly good game. Much better than Mafia 2: Definitive Edition, as the Mafia remake was made by those who truly loved the original. The world was splendid, the gameplay was smoothened out, the bugs weren’t as bad, and the narrative shined brighter than before thanks to more work being put towards the animation and cinematic direction. Mafia: Definitive Edition is a diamond in the rough and a lot of people have tapped onto me about how underrated this game truly is. Bought it during a sale, beat it within a week, and can confidently say that this game is alright. I like it. The story is as good as they say and the world is a wonder to soak in. As to whether I’d say it’s a game I’d easily recommend to others that is tricky. Mafia: Definitive Edition is great when it comes to delivering its story and presenting cool set pieces, but the moment it wants to be a video game is when it teeters. I have not played the original Mafia, but somehow they have managed to make a game that feels more dated than Rockstar Games. Mafia: Definitive Edition is finicky to say the least, but I still very much appreciate the effort put into it and forgive its shortcomings for how good the story is. So today we’re talking about Mafia: Definitive Edition and why it may be worth checking out.
Story
You follow Tommy Angelo as he recollects his memories serving the Salieri family. Taking place across 8 years of American history, Tommy remembers the days of the Great Depression. Money was hard to come by and Tommy was making end’s meet as a cabbie. Only making enough to afford a decent meal at the end of each day and pay for the gas needed for another day of work. He was ready to finish his shift one night when two mobsters ran up and bang on his cab doors. Paulie Lombardo and Sam Trapini, two members of the Salieri family. They threaten Tommy at gunpoint to help them escape men of the Morello family, a rival gang. They were catching up to them, and the two said they would shoot Tommy if he didn’t help them escape. So Tommy does just that and manages to make it back to Salieri’s bar safely. Sam returns with a wad of cash to thank Tommy for his work, and if he was ever in a pickle again then he should come back to the bar. Tommy counts the wad of cash given to him that night and realizes it was a lot. This type of money makes him start thinking of joining.
The very next day Tommy is chased by members of the Morello family for helping Salieri’s men, and Tommy runs back to the bar where Salieri’s men scare Morello’s henchmen off. Tommy is welcomed by Salieri openly who states he not only wants to protect his men, but citizens who live in his territory. He’s a kind person who believes in dignity, respect, honor, and trust. Tommy sees this as an opportunity and tells Salieri he wants to work for him. Salieri welcomes Tommy into the family easily and starts assigning him jobs with Sam and Paulie. Stakes begin to rise as the economy changes, the world changes, and the fragile peace between Salieri & Morello breaks as more gang warfare begins to break out. Tommy shall remember all he did as a mobster and soon enough this life of crime would come back to bite him in the ass.
Gameplay
There’s a reason why I mentioned Grand Theft Auto 3 and Rockstar Games earlier in the review, and that’s because Mafia: Definitive Edition plays exactly like one of their games. You go from objective marker to objective marker, fulfill whatever goal is given to you, fight baddies, and try to move forward. There’s a lot of driving in this game, and driving is what you come to expect from any game with a car. There’s a pedal to move forward and a pedal to brake. Turn, honk, try not to run into cars and pedestrians, and if you’re having a hard time controlling your speed then you can turn on a limiter which allows the car to travel at a max speed of forty miles per hour. If you run into a car or pedestrian this will stir up chaos, and if the action gets reported police will begin to chase you. If more chaos is caused during the police’s pursuit the crime rating goes up and more police will be sent to hunt you down and put you behind bars. If they catch you or you get killed then it’s game over. Your only option is to drive away and avoid them long enough until they give up and stop pursuing you. Encouraging you to get good at driving away quickly or hiding for a specific amount of time.
Main missions are pretty simple. Do certain things, walk a bit, do more things, and maybe trigger a combat sequence. Combat is simple too as it follows cover shooter rules. Carry two guns at a time usually a handgun and rifle-esque weapon. You can only carry so much ammo at once and you gotta reload when the clip is empty. Enemies like to pop out of cover, you have a health bar surprisingly enough, and when near death you must avoid fire for a short period of time so that a small fraction of health can replenish. There are medkits lying around for if you want to heal, and you can loot ammunition or even swap to different guns. There’s a small assortment of guns to utilize. Magnum, revolver, shotgun, double barrel shotgun, rifle, and the all powerful machine gun. Take cover behind sturdy surfaces, move to new cover when you feel pressured by enemy numbers or environmental hazards, and take advantage of environmental hazards yourself like explosive barrels and destructible cover. Once you’re done, walk to the next mission objective, get in a car, drive, drive some more, and so on. This is a fairly simple game, but the reason why it’s that way is because of the heavy focus on the narrative. May this life of crime pay off…
Thoughts
Mafia: Definitive Edition has an amazing story and setting worth experiencing if you can ignore the genuinely mediocre gameplay it forces onto you. The game is great at everything else, but the moment it wants to be a video game is when I started to hate it. In the past I’ve talked about Rockstar and the design choices they’ve influenced. I have an essay on Red Dead Redemption 2 from awhile back, and in that essay I stated that almost every design choice they followed has a marriott of flaws that are hard to fix or were impossible to fix to begin with. It’s very much just following the dotted line to the next objective, following an NPC, interacting with an object, and in an attempt to freshen things up they throw in some basic combat. It’s holding you by the hand as if you were a child, and while I get some games focus on getting you to exciting moments as soon as possible instead of wasting your time it does make the world you are placed in less exciting to explore and interact with. What if I want to take my time? See what lies on this street, interact with the locales, and do fun side activities? Following the dotted line gets repetitive, but when attempting to explore the world and have fun I realized something. There is absolutely nothing in the world to do. No side quest, side activities, or things to buy like weapons or cars because there’s no currency to speak of. So you’re pretty much following the narrative no matter what meaning Mafia: Definitive Edition fails at being a decent open world game.
Something feels off with how the character controls too. Moving around feels awkward, turning is finicky, vaulting over objects is the same as running so if you want to run to cover you might just accidentally leap over it, and half the time this gets you killed. Melee attacks feel weird, but as if that matters because half the time brawls nail down to button mashing and countering once if the enemy has the edge over you. Gunplay is somehow worse because accuracy and hitboxes are all over the place. They sway a lot and somehow even with a shotgun it manages to miss with a big hitbox window. Apparently the best weapon in the game is the machine gun. The gun you expect to have the worst accuracy. Enemies deal a ridiculous amount of damage even on lower difficulties. I played this game on normal mode and there were moments that lead to frustration due to the design of combat arenas along with the awkward controls. They claimed they’ve toned down the difficulty, so I can’t imagine the difficulty of the original version. My favorite part of the gameplay is when you’re driving, which is fine. Even then that gets repetitive after a while and you get nothing from it after a conversation in the car ends. They even added a button to skip driving to a mission objective, so even the devs know how meaningless and a massive waste of time the driving is.
So I’d say Mafia: Definitive Edition isn’t a very good video game, and your love for this game will depend on whether you seek good gameplay or anything else. Luckily though this game has a few redeeming aspects and it’s what made me like it in the end. Twenty years have passed since the original and the city of Lost Heaven has been recreated. It's much prettier than before, and even though there’s lighting issues every now and then I’d say the world is beautiful to soak in. They did a good time recapturing the feel of the 1930s, and I’d say the game is pretty historically accurate too. With references to the prohibition era, women’s suffrage, and much more. You can tell the people who wrote this game are history freaks, and I respect that. There’s a ton of detail to the world and characters, and the animation is stellar when it wants to be. I say that because there are times when the cutscenes look really good, and when you can tell they assembled them within two hours. I can forgive that though seeing how they made this alongside the definitive edition for Mafia 2. The music is great as they try to mimic the type of music being made at the time, and it knows when to get exciting during furious action set pieces. I may not have liked the gameplay, but Mafia is really well paced and it's all thanks to a brilliantly presented narrative.
This game has one of the best crime redemption stories I’ve seen in a video game, and it’s this story alone that makes Mafia: Definitive Edition worth playing. The main reason Tommy joins the Salieri family is because he really has nothing going on in his life. He lives in a crappy little apartment, has no friends or family, and the customers he drives around each day treat him like sh*t. His life is hell, and it’s by meeting Sam and Paulie that he finds a way out of this life. He starts taking dangerous jobs, gaining the trust of Salieri, and Sam and Paulie basically become what are basically brothers to Tommy. Family is a recurring theme throughout Mafia and early on Tommy meets the love of his life Sarah. They move in together, get married, have kids, and the game treats it as if it was a side story. We don’t get to really see much of Tommy’s normal life, and that’s because we the player think anything outside the crime narrative is boring. Then the plot thickens, things get worse, and both Tommy and the player begin to realize things are getting out of hand. They start to see the consequences of Tommy’s actions, all he has hurt, and he realizes that at any moment Sarah and their kids can get sucked in and killed. He wants out of this life, but it’s already too late. Tommy has been sucked in, all eyes are on him, and even if he tries to escape the consequences will catch up to him. Which they do as Tommy’s world falls apart and he starts to think about the remaining time he has left. The time left to live and spend the rest of days attending to his family. It’s a great story and I think the ending pays off for what is a grueling game in my humble opinion. If I were reviewing the story alone it would be a 9/10.
Mafia: Definitive Edition is a diamond in the rough. Its core principles are terrible and once in a while they throw a terrible mission at you. However, if you can toughen it out and break through the barriers you’ll find a stunning city and emotional story. This is one of those few occasions where being a story over gameplay guy pays off. Personally I like an even mix of both, but this is an occasion where I’m fine with one being prioritized over the other. I don’t know if I would recommend Mafia: Definitive Edition or not. I enjoyed the story enough though and the game is well paced, so I wouldn’t consider it a waste of my time or money. The game is actually pretty cheap and even cheaper when on sale, so I’d recommend picking it up till then. In the end I am going to have to give Mafia: Definitive Edition an 8/10 for being pretty good.
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