izigame.me

Who has times for values when your value as a working man is all but nothing in the Great Depression?
I must admit, I have played the original game on playstation 2 and I don't think I even got past the first or second level. The game was notorious for difficulty even then and I think I just didn't have enough of a fascination with the setting at the time to appreciate it.
Which is strange. I grew up loving movies like Scarface (and it also had an incredible PS2 game, one of the best of all time even) and of course, who hasn't seen Goodfellas or The Godfather 1 and 2? But for whatever reason, Mafia 1 simply avoided my radar for many years. Back then, I was far more fixated on the Grand Theft Auto games or stealth games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, or my personal favourite PS2 game of all time, Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven.
Years later, I played Mafia 2 with my cousins. And it is one of my fondest game memories of all time, because I never expected to love it as much as I did. Of course, anyone who has played Mafia 2 knows how Mafia 1 ends, as one of the missions is effectively the finale of the first game.
It was time, finally, to come back to Lost Heaven and complete this journey from its beginning. Mafia: Definitive Edition ran like a dream for me, on borderless windowed mode, connected via HDMI to a big TV in a living room environment. I ran it at the highest settings without a single stutter, to my absolute amazement. The entire time, I only encountered 2 small glitches that were entirely visual and not too immersion breaking. And one frame drop for a few seconds during one mission as it rendered a new part of a level. Other than that, this is one of the best looking and best running games I've ever played to have this fidelity of impressive, artistic effort.
It is just nice being able to get a game and play it, just to have it work as intended without flaw. I moaned at first about the 2k Launcher, but the option to disable it and made me never think about it again. As far as I could tell, it did not hinder the performance of the game, unlike most second-party launchers.
The gameplay itself is certainly one of the original's time. As I said out loud several times during some very frustrating missions (you know the ones, the race and the "shoot this armoured part" missions, that are perhaps more frustrating than the infamous RC missions of San Andreas or the Vice City RC helicopter mission from game-infamy and hell.), a common complaint of mine was "there is a reason these mechanics don't exist in video games anymore"
The original Mafia was developed by a studio that apparently had most of their experience with racing games. As a result, the original game is 80% driving. Fitting, given you play a cabby turned Made Man. The remake is no different. This game is mostly driving, but when the shooting does come, it stays for a long while.
Gameplay wise, Mafia is a fairly challenging game that doesn't hold your hand much. It feels less in common with newer GTAs and more like Brothers in Arms, Hell's Highway, where you are constantly grabbing to what cover you can to exchange deadly accurate or fatally inaccurate fire with some pretty dedicated goons who love to turtle. Cops and late game enemies are more likely to charge you mindlessly in an attempt to catch you while reloading or repositioning, while other enemies may actually lay down heavy suppressive fire from a Tommygun/Lost Heaven Typewriter, the king of all heaters in this era, effectively overwhelming you before you can react. In other instances, enemies actually will take up marksmanship positions and absolutely dome you with the precision of Lee Harvey Oswald.
In a way, I do appreciate a game that doesn't have such a deficient attention span to its violence. Mafia allows you to slowly control the pace of the firefights and I really enjoyed how immersive, intense and resource-gathering intensive they actually were. The controls can fight you, surely. Rockstar is still the king of giving your character realistic weight and momentum while still being playable, but Mafia makes a noble effort. It is just that often, you find yourself stumbling out of cover inappropriately or moving too slowly in and out of vehicles, to a huge disadvantage.
This is a linear game that has a wide open world to act as a beautiful backdrop, which is honestly unfortunate. This game could have benefited from more things to do in post-game Free Ride mode like the original apparently had. Even L.A Noire, who suffered also from having a staggeringly impressive city worthy of an open world game or multiplayer experience, at least had an abundance of little shootouts and other police related calls to respond to (often with their own cutscenes). It was far from immersive and it frankly detracted from L.A Noire's focused campaign and how its rare examples of partaking in violence actually made it more narrative effective. So in a way, Mafia Definitive Edition actually saves itself from this stumble.
Outside of your main hub, you can see interesting things (once the prohibition ends, you start seeing ads for alcohol that were not there before, for example) and you can overhear some really human conversations among NPCs about the economy, the local politics, the growing fear of a conflict in Europe reignited, etc. Sadly, most of the city doesn't feel as alive, but it fits the more 'quiet' era in a lot of ways. Traffic can be really frustrating (the cars handle about as well as they do in Cyberpunk early on, which is barely passable at all) and I know I certainly ended up paying a lot of fines in game because of pedestrians freezing on crosswalks or accidentally swiping a car because I was not going to sit around and wait for a bunch of chumps to disembark a trolley)
In the end, it is all about the story and characters. Mafia has one of the best stories in the mobster setting of all time. The characters feel eccentric at times, but very real people. Something about this sort of life just draws these individuals in and its impossible to be an ordinary Joe when you live in extraordinary circumstances. These aren't street thugs, but men of wealth and influence whose job is that of violence, coercion, extortion, thievery, all with a saintly face to their allies (and victims) and a devilish grin to their enemies.
The beginning and ending of Mafia runs at a fast pace, sometimes to a point of being a bit flawed. Plot points and character development moves quicker than it should, even though it still manages to stick things well. Meanwhile, the middle section, the 'guts' - stays its welcome the longest and while it's never unwarranted, it is easy to wish this was a 30 hour story rather than a 10 hour one. But what you do get is quality and sometimes that is more than enough.
The story is at times, recounted by the protagonist, in a cold fashion. Of course, when one lives a life like this, there has to be some degree of clinical attachment and blame shifting. This does add to the points where morality and values conflict with you are doing, which makes for some delicious onscreen drama between characters. Motivations aren't always clear and even when characters admit to certain ones, you are unsure how to fully grasp the depth of what they are saying or if anything they said is true at all.
Yet, there are small things, mere anecdotes recounted in dialogue with convincing emotion, that will stay with me. There is some true and genuine brilliance in this game's writing, that really is rarely scene in other games of this type.
Mafia is mandatory for fans of the setting and for anyone who enjoys a story-driven game that actually has a story worth talking and contemplating about. It is honestly wild to think that a lot of these sorts of crimes did occur in the Prohibition era over just a handful of bucks, alongside a war brewing in Europe, corrupt politicians and an economic crisis.
The past reminds us of the present...