Thoughts on: Mafia: The Old Country

Well, Hangar 13 has finally had a chance to make a proper new Mafia game again. While it seems that Mafia III had its fans, I found it to be terribly boring and having barely anything to do with Mafia in structure, tone, storytelling or anything else. Then was the remake of the original game, awkwardly named Mafia: Definitive Edition, that was certainly not “definitive”, but a very good attempt at a remake of a classic, that was even better in some ways. But still, it was a remake of an already great game, so not original or new. And now Mafia: The Old Country – a story set decades before the first game in Sicily, a fresh setting and an attempt to tell something new. They certainly tried with this one, that I can’t help but respect, but the results are not as exciting as one would have hoped.

If you are a fan of the original two titles in the series, you would be happy to know that Mafia: The Old Country remains, first and foremost, a linear cinematic story driven action adventure game that uses its open world as a backdrop, not as a focus. The game isn’t as concise and focused as the original game or its remake, unfortunately, but there’s significantly less downtime than in the second game either, striking a good balance between focused experiences and having some time for optional exploration. Almost all of the main gameplay elements also remain the same, despite the change of the game engine, so you are going to have some car chases, some shootouts and some stealth, it’s just that this time there are also horses and special boss fights using knives.

While nothing about the mechanics particularly stands out, as most of the ideas have been carried over from the remake of the first game or Mafia III, the shootouts do feel really fun and stealth at least attempts to have some curious ideas with quicker kills using your knife “resource”. It’s just that in real situations, it’s barely ever used or required, especially if you disable the QTEs (which is odd that they are just disabled, not switched from tap to hold as is usual for games). Visually the game is quite stunning and the switch to Unreal Engine 5 have allowed the developers to avoid the highly uneven look their previous games had, where cutscenes and some locations would look incredible, but other times everything would look flat and ugly. Now things have a very consistent and genuinely wonderfully artistically put together look, while the occasional orchestral music enhances moments of action or sadness.

And speaking of the moments, the storytelling is… okay. It’s actually somewhat hard to judge the storytelling here, because when exciting things happen, they are usually really well told. The issue with Mafia: The Old Country is that most of the story events are just not interesting enough. Both original Mafia and its sequel had very different tone and characters and yet they knew how to keep things exciting. Every chapter of the story felt like something new, or started as something familiar until an unexpected complication would happen turning everything upside down. In The Old Country things happen exactly as you’d expect them to happen and in the most plain and uninteresting way possible. Perhaps, this could’ve worked if the developers leaned even heavier into the locale and the Sicilian traditions, because that aspect occasionally shines through, but even that is underutilized in the end with the world itself, its nature and architecture, doing the heavy lifting in creating atmosphere.

Apart from the general sleepiness of the plot, the game also has quite a few extremely awkward decisions and choices. A lot of camera cuts and cutscene transitions, for example, are done via a very awkward fade to black, where the first two titles were usually far more interesting in that regard. The already mentioned knife boss fights are so… gamey that it actually gets distracting at times, where you enter some circular room closer to the end of a chapter and just immediately go “yep, this is the obligatory knife fight room, let’s get this over with”. And even thematically, the game just kind of stumbles to the ending and then just ends, without really saying anything, where even Mafia III occasionally had something to say. It’s a rather plain forbidden love story that plays out exactly as you expect it to, apart from the moments where it doesn’t, because it doesn’t seem to understand what it wants to do.

I was very happy to see Mafia: The Old Country to stick to what makes Mafia series what they are. The setting is solid, there are lots of good gameplay decisions (mixed with some bad ones). If only it was as exciting and interesting as some of its later chapters are throughout the whole game… But it isn’t – most of the time it’s a story that you can sleepwalk through, that gives very few reasons to care about what is going on. And it’s a real shame. But it can still be a pleasant story-driven experience.