Mafia (2002)

Playtime: 1h13m

Intro

Mafia is a 2002 "open world" third person shooter in which you drive around an empty city with nothing to do to get from A to B in missions.

I played this with the Mafia Community Modpack, which vastly improves the graphics (it looks like a 2005-2006 game, which is a big jump).

Review

Obviously, games have improved a lot in the past 20 years. Mafia has exceptionally poor waypoints, especially in a city with lots of rivers and during the chase mission early on. The default controls are bizarre and require extensive rebinding. The city only has cars and pedestrians - no stores or anything.

Other than having aged poorly Mafia also suffers from "GTA 5 disease". You spend way more time driving than actually being a criminal. In the 76 minutes i played i only knocked someone out and destroyed three cars - it's that slow. The writing is also typical mafia nonsense, you could have an AI generate the dialogue.

Conclusion

Despite the amazing work done by modders this relic just isn't worth your time. Even GTA San Andreas, released 2 years later, was vastly superior.

I really liked the setting of Mafia. Being able to travel around the city set in the 1930's was fun. The city felt lived-in and the streets were always bustling with people. It reminded me quite a bit of LA Noire in its time period, and setting. I also liked the game's story, and how it all unfolded. It felt like an homage to all of the great films in the mafia film genre.

The combat, and controls can be a bit of a hurtle in this game. The shootouts can be challenging, but not always in a good way. While you're meant to take cover while shooting, your cover will also block your shots or even prevent you from firing at all. This would be fine if enemy fire were blocked in the same way, but that rarely feels like the case. Enemies will often still be able to hit you while you're struggling to shoot around cover.

Despite the challenges faced with the controls and gameplay, I would still recommend this game for its story and setting.

06/10

So there is a lot I LOVED about this game and a lot I HATED about this game.

I LOVED the gunfights, the open city, the missions, the storyline (for the most part, I actually liked the ending), the different time-period appropriate vehicles, the free modes (although I haven't explored them much yet) and the fact that you sort of had options in a lot of missions (for example you could just kill everyone or you could use stealth and wit to complete missions without having to do as much killing ..... I usually just killed everyone lol.)

However, I found myself RAGING fairly often at this game in multiple instances. And I had to step back and think, am I doing this mission 25 times in a row and failing 25 times in a row because I just suck, or because there's something wrong here? And I think it's fair to say sometimes I just sucked, and sometimes there were flaws in the game, in my opinion.

For one, the NPCs you fight with in some of the missions are GARBAGE. You fail the mission if they die, but they love nothing more than to run directly into gunfire (including your own gunfire), dive headfirst into explosions and stomp on grenades (there aren't a lot of grenades in this game, but when there are it seems like they want to run as fast as they can to make sure they're directly on top of them when they explode). Yes if I was skilled enough to do an excellent job protecting them despite their flaws I would be able to win the mission. But the point of the mission isn't to babysit a couple of the world's worst mafiosos, so I felt the NPCs should at least be a little more decent at staying alive.

The icing on the cake was when I finished a mission where I was with Paulie and Sam, and then Sam left, his health bar was off my screen, and all I needed was to drive across town with Paulie and I was good to go. Except about a minute into that drive I got a game over ... because SAM died. I wondered if there was a hidden time bar where if I didn't get somewhere fast enough Sam would die, but I just tried again at the same pace and I got through the whole drive with no problem. So it was a glitch.

And there were a LOT of glitches in this game that drove me bonkers. I hate using cheat codes, but I looked up the cheat code to refill my health for times when I had effectively finished a mission but some glitch prevented me from actually finishing. Then I could more easily redo it again because I was satisfied that I'd already done it without cheating. Other examples (other than random game overs that don't make sense) include finishing everything I had to do but a cut scene failing to launch (but when I retry and do everything seemingly the same it does trigger), myself or an NPC getting stuck between objects or fused with a vehicle somehow and unable to move so I have to reset, and the game just plain crashing (might not be the game's fault I guess but I have a good computer, I don't usually have that problem with other games and it happened multiple times, and I'm already mad so I'm counting that).

And the other thing I raged at was unnecessary unskippable dialog or other things to go through every time you fail a certain mission. Some were tolerable, like just having to walk for a bit further, but the one that really bothered me was having to do an extremely boring 5-minute drive across town (yes I timed it), following traffic laws so the cops don't pull you over, all just to do one thing that I couldn't figure out so I kept doing it over and over. Yes if I had been smart enough to figure it out sooner I wouldn't have had to deal with the grueling drive, but is that really necessary?? Why does the game want to punish me for my stupidity with BOREDOM? I ended up looking up a walkthrough (which I also hate doing) and the actual solution took about 10 seconds, so the whole mission was a 5-minute boring drive and 10 seconds of doing something for those who were smart enough to figure it out on their own. And 5 minutes of boredom adds up when you're a simpleton like me and redo the mission 6 or 7 times.

I figure my rant has gone on long enough, but I want to add that when missions were extremely difficult but felt FAIR (no glitches, no imbecile NPCs, etc.) I got frustrated but I didn't feel actual anger and I still felt much more enjoyment even through my many failures. I may have repeated the mission 20 times but I never thought to go to cheats or walkthroughs because I wasn't left questioning whether the game was screwing me over again or I just sucked. I could just accept that I sucked.

Because of my bitterness over the glitches and such I was leaning toward giving this 3 stars, but after I finished the story mode and cooled down for a bit I realized that I did enjoy this game quite a bit, and it provided a longer and more satisfying story mode than some of the other games I've recently played (even if a lot of that time was me cursing at my screen and playing the same mission for the umpteenth time.) If it wasn't for the previous gripes I mentioned, it might be a 5-star game. I get that it's an old game, but I've played older games with fewer problems. At least I can hope that when I play the sequels (which I'm looking forward to doing) some of these issues might have been worked out.

Also, if you think the game is fine and I actually just suck, please let me know! Maybe it will help me have a better mindset for when I get frustrated at other games, and I like hearing other people's opinions! And if you got through this whole review, you certainly deserve to have your voice heard :D