Despite releasing a few days ago I’ve managed to finish the game already. Looking at my PlayStation profile, I finished the game at 15 hours which isn’t a long game for sure, but I don’t feel it ended too fast which is what matters.
Just to warn anyone who does read this, please expect major story spoilers.
The Story
In terms of the story I feel it’s one of the best in the series. Mafia II was my previous favorite in terms of the story and although Mafia The Old Country (MTOC) isn’t exactly an original story, that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable. You have your traditional coming up story where Enzo goes from nothing to something along with the forbidden love of him falling for the bosses daughter, Isabella.
The game undeniably starts off very slow which I honestly found a bit boring but once it reached a certain point, I’d say after Enzo wins the horse race and starts to get proper jobs from Luca and Don Torrisi, things pick up a lot faster and get much better. Towards the end they sort of give hints at how things will turn out as Isabella sort of mentions how her father’s outlook turns darker and darker from when his wife/Isabella’s mother passes away.
Once Don Torrisi seems to favor Enzo over Cesare for important jobs after Luca’s passing, you know he’s the jealous type and just simply gets bitter over it. At the end of the game when Cesaro just keeps complaining about how “you could have had it all”, you can tell all his actions were motivated by jealously and he fails to see that if he had helped Enzo and Isabella disappear, he would be the only one left and likely could have got more responsibility to takeover Luca’s role in the family.
Luca was another great character and after they had the scene where Valentina made a big deal about him going out to ‘take care of business’ you just knew something bad was about to happen to him. He was so committed to the family which is what made it so interesting that his dying advice to Enzo was to get out while he still can. Ironically now I mention this, I wonder what happened to Valentina as we never really found out and she did help them try to escape so was she punished, or her part was never found out?
The Gameplay
This is where I feel the game fell a bit short. In terms of the gameplay, I don’t feel there’s any area that I can say the game excelled at compared to other similar games or even other games in the series. The driving felt clunky at times, general movement was tedious when you needed to be in a very specific position to interact with someone or something, missions although enjoyable could feel quite repetitive and I feel the pacing aspects of certain gameplay mechanics could have been improved. Two very minor touches which could have helped would be way points when driving and better subtitles as even with English selected, they still used to many Italian terms that I had to Google myself.
Regarding those last gameplay points, I feel there was a massive gap between knife fights early in the game so after that big break, I had pretty much forgot all of the flow of it but that may just be me. The shooting was good in terms of sound effects and reactions, seeing an enemy run at you then get blasted at close range with a shotgun and just stopped in their tracks looked great and realistic.
In terms of the smoothness and graphics, I felt the game looked beautiful on the PS5 Pro and I did notice a few texture pop ins and frame rate drops but this was a rare occurrence. I was actually glad I had the PS5 Pro as it received PS5 Pro optimization not long before the game released.
Despite all the negatives mentioned, the story made me want to keep going and made up for the gameplay’s shortcomings. If I was to give this a score, I think an 8 out of 10 is very fair as the game wasn’t perfect but also wasn’t bad, it was very well worth the money I paid for it and was an enjoyable experience. If they do make the long rumored Mafia 4 in 1970’s Las Vegas it will easily be a day one purchase for me.