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The Godfather is perhaps one of the most influential Mafia films of all time. It made the mob look cool and honourable (to a certain extent). Despite that, there hasn’t been a good Mafia game in ages. That’s something that Mafia: The Old Country hopes to change.
Me? I don’t really buy it.
Hangar 13 hasn’t produced a good Mafia game in…well…ever. I didn’t really like the first two, and the third just plain sucked. It goes without saying that I went into this one highly ambivalent.
I was hoping for the best, but expected the worst.
After days of gameplay time with the game, how does it fare?
What is Mafia: The Old Country?
Mafia: The Old Country is a third-person action adventure title developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K Games. It is available right now on the PC, PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
Our copy was gifted to us by the folks over at 2K. Thanks so much!
Since Mafia: The Old Country is a PC game, I reviewed it on our trio of gaming hardware setups, as usual.
Here are the specs in case you’re wondering:
Desktop 1 –
– MSI B550M Mortar WIFI
– AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with NZXT Kraken X73 RGB Liquid Cooler
– MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim X 24G
– Teamgroup T-Force Dark Z 64GB DDR4 RAM
– Samsung 980 PRO 2TB SSD
– NZXT C1200 Gold ATX 3.1
– Lian Li LANCOOL III RGB case
Desktop 2 –
– MSI MPG X870E Carbon WiFi
– AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D with Cooler Master MasterLiquid 360L Core ARGB cooler
– Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24GB
– G.SKILL Trident Z5 NEO 32GB DDR5-6400 RAM
– Samsung 990 PRO 2TB SSD
– Corsair RM850x PSU
– Lian Li LANCOOL 207 Digital
Notebook –
MSI Raider GE78 HX 14V
– Intel Core i9 14900HX
– NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
– 32GB DDR5 RAM
– 1TB SSD
The majority of the hardware above has been kindly sponsored by MSI (Desktop 1 and the MSI Raider GE78 HX 14V) and AMD (Desktop 2), and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support!
Mafia: The Old Country is a story about a young man named Enzo.
Originally a miner, a series of events forces Enzo to make a run for it from the mine, pursued by his former employers. Enzo ends up hiding on land controlled by Don Torrisi, who scares the rival mafioso off and takes in the boy.
From there it’s your typical rags to riches story, about how Enzo rises in the ranks of the Torrisi family. It’s a tale as old as time, but is decently told with one small exception.
The love interest (and the Don’s daughter), Isabella.
She’s your typical selfish brat and is the most unlikeable character in the whole game.
She brazenly ignores the rules, and makes life difficult for Enzo because she likes him. She plays it off as if she’s innocent in it all but yet, goes out of her way to tease, tempt and instigate Enzo to do things for her or with her.
Enzo isn’t blameless in all of this too. The idiot, despite knowing it’s a stupid thing to do, keeps up with her as well! Just because she’s the first girl who’s nice to him.
God, I wish I could just reach out and slap both of them with a mallet.
Where is it written that every mafia story has to have a love interest? Even in the Godfather films, I felt that Michael’s relationships with Apollonia and Kay were easily some of the worst parts of the movies.
Can’t we just focus on the criminal activities, the backstabbing, the politicking and the brotherhood while skipping all the cringey love interest stuff?
I mean, without the cliched romance subplot between Enzo and Isabella, the story is already good enough. The brotherhood between Enzo and Cesare (and Leone later on) and the shenanigans they get up to was much more interesting than anything that developed between Enzo and his lady love.
I wished the game was open enough to allow you to cap Isabella at first sight, just to be spared the romance subplot.
Mafia: The Old Country is an incredibly linear experience.
The game shackles you firmly to the plot, ditching the open world from the past games. Sicily is a huge area but you’re never given free rein to explore the world. You only get to roam a bit during missions. Coming from past games, I keep hoping for the game to be open world as I played but it never happened.
Does this automatically make Mafia: The Old Country a bad title though? It does if you’re expecting more of the same. However, if you take it for what it is (a mission based action game), you might actually enjoy it.
Now, to be fair, there is an open-world experience.
However, it is a separate mode from the story.
Wut?
I have no idea why they did this. It boggles the mind to be honest. Perhaps it’s because deep down, Hangar 13 knew their open world isn’t up to snuff. While Sicily is beautiful in-game, it is also devoid of any meaningful content.
In Explore mode, you can drive around and visit Garages and Safehouses, fast travel and find collectibles…and that’s it. No side missions, no optional story content. Not even random, emergent events. It’s a toothless mode, offering nothing much other than to collect stuff you’ve missed for the completionists.
I’m disappointed thoroughly with the Explore mode and the lack of progression for Enzo.
Despite the game taking place over a number of years in the early 1900s, Enzo doesn’t feel stronger or wiser over time. He has no stats or skill tree to improve. Enzo from the beginning of the game is Enzo at the end.
The only way you can modify your experience is via charms that can offer various benefits.
There are 22 of them in the game, and they give various perks like silent footsteps (very useful) or allow you to carry more ammo. You can equip a number at a time but it’s a mechanic that doesn’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things. I mean the perks are nice to have, but none of them are truly game changing.
You still drive cars or ride horses. You still get into shootouts. With or without decent perks.
The cover-based shooting is fine but the AI can be really boneheaded. Sometimes they’d use cover intelligently but there will also be moments when they break into a kamikaze charge. They’ll just rush to your location, abandoning all sense and cover.
Who does that in real life?
If frontal assaults aren’t your thing, the game gives you the option of going stealthy for some parts.
These hide and sneak bits are decent enough, but the AI is also braindead here as well. You could be right beside them and they won’t notice you. Unless you’re standing right in the middle of their sightline, they’ll ignore you. They have zero peripheral vision.
During stealth, you get rid of enemies via silent takedowns or thrown objects.
Takedowns come in two flavours. You can choke somebody out, or stab them. Stabbing is faster, but it blunts your knife.
Unfortunately, worn-out knives are bad, because they don’t allow you to break into lockboxes for loot. These are optional of course, but who would pass up free loot?! That means most of the time you’ll be going for the slower choke.
Mafia: The Old Country takes a page out of Metal Gear Solid, by letting you get rid of bodies in specially marked boxes. Things get wildly unrealistic here, as bodies you plop into them vanish!
Literally!
The camera will show you putting them in and they’ll vanish from your sight before you even close the lid! POOF! Just like magic! You can keep putting in man after man, into the same container with no issues!
Mission variety is also lacking in my opinion. Much too often, the missions devolve into either knife fights, a stealth mission to rescue/kidnap/murder somebody or a shootout.
Sometimes it’s all three in a mission.
Gunplay is fine but you’re limited to period authentic weapons, which doesn’t always equate to a good time. Accuracy for the guns is abysmal (unless you use rifles or the Deluxe Edition weapons) and you’re going to get hit a lot when you pop up out of cover to aim.
Unfortunately, even on Medium, the game is highly unforgiving. You have 5 health segments and getting hit quickly depletes them. You can only regen health to fill the particular segment you’re at so you can be stuck low health for long periods because you’ve run out of bandages to heal completely.
It’s a stupid gameplay mechanic that’s at fault here.
Whenever you move or pop out of cover, your aim takes a while to stabilize.
If you fire before the aiming reticule shrinks, you will miss the majority of the time.
It doesn’t matter if the enemy is up close or not, or even if they’re smack in the middle of the crosshairs. You will miss. I’ve had an enemy right on the other side of my cover shot at by a shotgun and the slug still missed because the accuracy wasn’t there.
It’s XCOM levels of accuracy bullshit all over again.
It’s not a matter of getting good, it’s a matter of a bad gameplay mechanic.
Knife fights are actually enjoyable though.
If you see a flash before an enemy attacks, you need to dodge. If you don’t see one, you need to counter the blow. It’s simple, but it works and makes the blade duels better than I expected them to be.
Most times, you’ll have a lengthy drive or ride (you can choose to drive a car or take a horse on some missions) to get to the mission area. You can skip the ride (via an option) but you’ll miss out on a ton of dialogue.
The Sicilian countryside looks damn good in Mafia: The Old Country but the graphics engine still has LOD pop up (on the trees especially), even when running the game on Epic settings.
Trees will magically become more detailed as you get closer. Shadows will suddenly render just a few meters ahead of you when you’re speeding merrily along. There are even object pop-up issues here and there.
It’s a damn shame that there’s no Photo Mode because even with its pop-in issues, the game can look very, very nice indeed. Textures are great, character models are nicely animated (even the faces) and you can get some really good screenshots at times.
Performance on all our testing rigs is stable, though there are bouts of slowdown and FPS drops here and there. The issues mostly occur during populated areas (such as towns). Weirdly, I had issues even on 1080p on Epic settings (with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs), so it’s definitely not hardware related. It’s an engine optimization problem, if I had to guess.
Otherwise, 4K/60 is easily achievable with AMD FSR or NVIDIA DLSS. Frame generation makes everything worse though, so I recommend turning it off and leaving it off.
The Bottom Line.
Mafia: The Old Country is a massive departure from the other games in the series.
In some ways, this departure is refreshing.
The location and time (Sicily, in the early 1900s) is a great take on the genre. It makes the story feel different from the usual mafioso tale that’s set in a city. The new knife fighting mechanics also makes for great gameplay too!
However, the linearity of the game irks. You feel less like a made man and more like an errand boy. There’s no downtime (where you can walk around and enjoy the game world) in-between missions to breathe, so you’ll always be feeling that you’re being shepherded around.
There’s also none of the trappings you’d expect in a game like this. No integrated open world, no skill tree…not even an upgrading mechanic for improving your rides or weapons. You simply buy new ones to replace your stuff.
While the visuals are top notch, the game engine can still use more optimizing. You’d expect that Epic settings would be free of visuals issues like pop-in or LOD rendering. Nope, still there. A damn shame.
At the end of the day though, Mafia: The Old Country is still a decent title. It’s a marked departure from the other games in the series though, so fans who go in blind will hate the new Mafia. Inform yourself of what to expect though, and it’s a decent tale of La Cosa Nostra.
TLDR:
Decent game but plagued by puzzling gameplay changes and mechanics that make it not for everybody.
The Good:
- Great visuals.
- Decent story and characters.
- Fun knife fights.
The Bad:
- Incredibly linear.
- Explore mode boring.
- No sense of character progression.
- Gunplay can be frustrating.
Salehuddin Husin, EIC
Sal's been in the industry since the early 2000s. He's written for a ton of gaming and tech publications including Playworks, Hardwarezone, HWM and GameAxis. Recently, Sal served as a juror for the Indie Game Awards at Taipei Game Show 2020. A geek and hardcore gamer, Sal will play everything, on any platform.
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