Hangar 13/2K Games
PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox
$50US/$70CDN
Buy a discounted Steam key from Fanatical, GameBillet or GamersGate
Who here is old enough to remember the Interactive Movie genre? Coined for a relatively short period in the 90s for titles like The 7th Guest, Night Trap, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, Ripper and even the occasional Wing Commander game, it was supposed to represent a fusion of movie-like storytelling, but with game play that evolved it beyond being a passive activity. It was once considered the wave of the future, but flamed out pretty quick when people realized that game makers are not movie makers and that most good movie makers didn't want to make games.
I bring this up because if there's two words that best describe Mafia: The Old Country to me, Interactive Movie would be it. You're either going to be into that idea, or very much not.
The original Mafia (which also has a fantastic remake) was one of my favourite games of its era and if I were making a favourite games of all-time list, it might very well be in the top ten. Mafia II was good, but didn't meet the goals they seemingly were going for. With Mafia III, they tried to turn the series into a Ubisoft-style open world, which many players didn't care for, myself included.
Mafia: The Old Country was said to be going back to the series' more focused roots and well, it certainly did that, but also went a good step further and I'm not sure that was to its benefit.
This game is very heavy on cutscenes, approaching Kojima-esque levels. I didn't count, but I reckon that of its 12-14 hour runtime, they made up at least half of it. It's also clear that they're where a lot of Hangar 13's efforts were focused. The performance capture is excellent, with nice framing of scenes and conversations and also has some of the best lip syncing I've ever seen in a game, which is impressive given how many AAA titles still have a hard time with that. The detail on some of the main characters is truly striking. The cast do a great job, and are credited in the opening sequence like they would be in a traditional film.
The quality of the character models and motion capture is where Mafia: The Old Country truly stands out.
The story itself isn't bad in my opinion, but it's also a very cliché mob tale and you'll see nearly all the twists coming a mile away unless you're pretty dense. Within a few minutes of starting, the main symbolic element is revealed with all the subtelty of a brick to the face. It's a well told and presented mob tale, but offers nothing surprising or revolutionary. Without spoiling it, I had a debate with a friend about the ending. He thought it was awful, I thought it was good in a slightly unexpected way, but it also didn't offer much of a moral beyond "Crime doesn't pay, mmmkay?"
The biggest regression in Mafia: The Old Country compared to the rest of the series is the game play. I call this an Interactive Movie because much like those of yore, the actual game part makes up the minority of this title's content and more than that, it's straight out of the 7th generation game design tropes guide. The first two titles in the series had open worlds, but they weren't large and didn't have much to do in them, but still felt like living, breathing places. In The Old Country, you're put into what at first seems like an open map, except you're given almost no opportunities to explore it and when you can, it feels stuck in time. It's very pretty, though being on Unreal Engine 5, also has wonky optimization and doesn't look good enough to justify its hardware demands.
It's a pretty world, when you actually get to see it. It's also rather brown, another 7th generation design throwback.
Most missions start with a lengthy cutscene, travelling to a location while listening to a lot of banter (you can skip these, but then you miss out on a lot of character development), another cutscene and then either some almost comically simple stealth sequences and/or rote cover based combat, another cutscene and then onto the next mission. Enemies are dumb as rocks, there's ammo and health everywhere, you're invincible when in cover and though you can hide bodies in the stealth sections, enemy patrols don't overlap so it never matters if you do. That's the extent of the game systems. It offers nothing new and relies on a lot of tropes that were largely moved on from years ago.
There's a bunch of collectibles which you can turn in for money to buy different outfits and ways to customize cars and horses, but you can't get them all in a single playthrough and will either have to replay missions or use the game's "explore mode" to grind the lifeless map trying to find them all. Even if you unlock everything, who are you showing it to? You don't spend much time in cars or on horses and your outfits are only really visible unsoiled in cutscenes anyway. Once you've finished the story, there's no replayability beyond those.
This isn't a full-priced title--though it's certainly not a value title either--and I do want to commend the normally very play-it-safe 2K Games for taking a risk of sorts here. They let Hangar 13 make something with AAA production values, but that was also a more focused, linear experience with a definitive end and wasn't trying to be yet another boring and bloated open world. That rarely happens now and as someone who is older and doesn't have the time for dozens of 50+ hour games a year, I appreciate that. The problem is that they could have achieved their goals of going back to the series roots by making something like Mafia 1, but in The Old Country. Instead, we got what feels like Mafia 0.5, where you're paying near AAA price to mostly watch a bog standard mob movie with just enough game play that it can't be called a walking simulator.
I'll be curious to see how this experiment works out for the series, but unless you're really into this specific kind of Interactive Movie experience, I would wait for at least a deep sale before picking up Mafia: The Old Country. At full price, there's just not enough meat on the bone here to make it worthwhile.
