Mafia: The Old Country

Publisher: 2K Games

Developer: Hangar 13

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Just about every year there's at least one game that hits me where I live...that by many objective measures is mediocre at best. Take Enotria: The Last Song from last year or Maneater from my Top 25 of All Time list. This year, that game seems to be Mafia: The Old Country. 

Unlike most folks, I don't have any notable history with the long-running Mafia series. In fact, my only experience with this saga is Mafia III several years ago, and we all know how that one turned out. So, it's possible that my relative newness to the franchise skews my perspective in a more positive light than the average person. The same can possibly be said for the fact that I haven't seen The Godfather. Either way, I expected that I might like Mafia: The Old Country, but I can't say it had an incredibly high bar to clear. Sometimes you have to take these kinds of gambles, and boy am I glad I did! While The Old Country seems as averse to innovation as a pair of cement shoes is to floating, it more than excels in the ways it wants to, and to great effect.

Mafia: The Old Country takes place in Sicily at the start of the 20th century. The story follows an indentured servant named Enzo (an unfortunate Tom Holland lookalike), who toils away in a mine run by the Spadaro mafia family. After breaking free from the mine, Enzo accidentally crosses into turf run by the opposing family: the Torrisi family. So when the Spadaros follow him, Don Torrisi is none too happy. He immediately places Enzo under his protection and threatens violent consequences if the Spadaros come for him again. From there, we follow Enzo as he grows from stable boy to trusted henchman. It's an expertly-paced story filled with intriguing characters, top-notch romance, and the kind of delicious treachery that makes stories like this fun. 

I obviously can't go into too much detail without spoiling things, but there are topics I can still cover. By far the best aspect of this story for me is the family itself and how it's presented. 

From the moment we meet Don Torrisi, it's hard not to like him. He comes off as this unbelievably warm guy who will also cut you up in ways you can't imagine if you cross his loved ones. Like your cousin on facebook who works in the oil field, but with a good suit. I jest, but everyone in this crime family says that the Don looks after his own, and his money is planted firmly in his mouth as this story begins. Of course, we all know that the guy is doing all sorts of nasty stuff on the side, but Enzo doesn't. 

And if a crime family is going to give work to a stable boy, they're not going to be forthcoming about many details, so there's this excellent sense of pacing where as Enzo does more and more for the family, he also ends up doing dirtier and dirtier deeds. It starts off with actions as simple as looking tough while somebody else collects a protection fee and eventually evolves into cold-blooded murder as the family's trust in him deepens. It feels realistic, but far more important than that, it feels like an actual upward trend of trust. 

At the end of the day, I found that this story works in much the same way that Red Dead Redemption 2's story does. When Enzo is officially inducted into the Torrisi family, it's a warm and fuzzy experience. It's a family full of borderline psychopathic folks, but by that point in the story, they're characters we've come to love. By developing the characters and the crime side-by-side, Mafia: The Old Country makes the whole induction into the family actually feel like being inducted into a family. That may seem like a small thing, but remember, I came into this entry on the back of Mafia III. I wasn't expecting to be so taken with this cast of characters or to become this invested in the story. And good thing, too, because the story is the glue that holds this whole thing together.

Takes about gameplay here are going to differ wildly. This is, in part, because The Old Country consistently seems poised to evolve, but never does. This game is largely a time capsule from the old days: an entirely linear cover-based shooter...and it isn't much else. Each mission is the same: you'll hop on a horse or into an old-timey car, travel to a place, then either engage in a shooting segment or do a stealth segment that ends in a shooting segment no matter how well you did at the stealth. 

The stealth is inoffensive. Enemy AI is pretty stupid, so a lot of the time you'll just be walking up on dudes with their backs turned and taking them out. Even when an enemy is mobile, their patterns are so rigid that you won't run into any trouble. There are ways of making stealth easier (such as tossing distraction items or big chests to store bodies in), but I only needed them once, and that was when it was required by the story. So, like I said, inoffensive. Not great by any objective measure, but not bad by any objective measure.

The shooting segments are, likewise, inoffensive. You carry a pistol, a long gun, and a knife. You can hold either a rifle or a shotgun in the long gun slot. None of these options are special in any way, but they get the job done. In theory, you'd use a shotgun for close quarters and the rifle for open spaces, but they seem to be equally effective at any range. The shooting itself is fun enough, but what you see in the first shooting segment is what you're going to see in all of them. So, again, inoffensive. 

The act of traveling to these objective areas is, you guessed it, also inoffensive. You kind of just...get in your car/on your horse and go, and that's it. There aren't any interesting things happening in the world, and even though you can get off your ride at any time along the way, there's nothing to actually do besides just keep going. The Sicilian countryside is absolutely gorgeous, and at the start, I couldn't wait to get out and explore it. The game even hints at some open world activities with a photography minigame that comes with a little notification about how you can do it at various points in the map...but those "various points" never appear. So, you have this relatively large map, but its only real purpose is to give you a travel sequence. I was disappointed by this, but it's kind of a breath of fresh air after the Ubisoft world that was Mafia III. Say it with me, children: inoffensive.

With all this talk of inoffensive game aspects, there is one last thing to discuss that I'll actually be taking points off for. See, Mafia: The Old Country is a game hobbled by the one thing that hobbles just about every game you find it in: racing. There are only three racing segments here, and while the first one is actually kind of thrilling, the other two are as lame as racing segments always are. In the second one, you have to win a car race in these old-timey cars, and they handle terribly. So, you absolutely will not win on your first run. And if that's the case, the game reloads you close to the finish line in second place. So no matter how badly you do, you'll always be put in a position where you can win easier if you lose. Even then, the cars handle so poorly under these high-speed conditions that you aren't even guaranteed to win with that handicap. 

The third racing segment isn't actually a race: it's a car chase. There are several chase segments in Mafia: The Old Country, but for whatever reason, there's only one that comes with a failure state (which is why I'm calling it a race). And unlike the actual car race, you don't get any kind of handicap if you fail. No, you have to start right from the beginning, and this is the case even if you finish the car part and die in the ensuing shootout. Die at any point in this mission, and you start the whole thing over right from when the chase begins. The poor car handling doesn't really ruffle my feathers out in the open world, but once the game demands you actually perform with it, quality takes a pretty massive nosedive.

Speaking of performance and massive quality nosedives...yep, the technical stack isn't quite up to par. Constant framerate drops are another thing that plagues the racing segments. They don't happen often in the open world, so the game clearly just can't handle multiple high-speed vehicles at the same time. These framerate drops also happen in just about every gameplay-to-cutscene and vice-versa transition, since the cutscene framerate is locked at 30fps. In that third racing segment I mentioned, I also found that the button to shoot out of the car disabled itself after attempt 3 and didn't get fixed on subsequent attempts. I also had a quest objective bug out in the latter half of the game, causing me to have to reload a checkpoint from the beginning of the mission. I also noticed fairly frequent audio glitches where there would be tearing sounds out of nowhere or certain types of flooring causing much louder versions of footsteps or dropped weapons than other floors. Thankfully there were never any crashes or visual glitches I can point to, but that's hardly a consolation in light of everything else.

In the latter half of this review, I've really gone to town on Mafia: The Old Country, but it's important to know this: I was absolutely hooked every moment...well, except for the racing. I didn't mind the uninspired gameplay or the entirely pointless openness of the map because for me, it was all about progressing this excellent story and getting to see what interesting character moments happened next. After a while, I didn't mind the fact that I wouldn't be able to explore Sicily anymore, because it meant there wouldn't be any bloat between story segments. Make no mistake: by many objective standards, Mafia: The Old Country isn't a good game, but it also largely depends on your expectations. If you're going into this expecting an experience akin to a small-scale Grand Theft Auto title, you're going to be disappointed. If you go into this hoping for an even somewhat unique gameplay experience, you're going to be disappointed. But if you go into this hoping to be told a compelling crime narrative with shockingly well-developed and well-acted characters, and you don't mind a bit of serviceable interactivity along the way, I think you'll find yourself surprisingly engaged. Mafia: The Old Country is maybe 10 hours at most, and I was along for the ride (almost) every step of the way. So if you can go into it with the right mindset, you'll be getting one of this year's best stories for a lower price than usual.

Let us review:

Racing segments - 1.0

Technical problems - 1.0

The final score for Mafia: The Old Country is...

8.0/10 - Great

Bravo, Hangar 13, bravo