Mafia 3

 

Being a fan of Mafia 1 (Original) Mafia 2, and Mafia 1 (Remake), I've been excited to get around to playing Mafia 3 at some point. Although I had seen trailers and advertisements for the game, and heard many people badmouthing it, it put me off a bit because the idea of a Mafia game set in the 1960s where you play as an African American just seemed kind of out of place? I wasn't sure what they were going for. But I reserved judgement until I played through it myself. Finally I got it on a discount and installed it and played through it recently.

There are no difficulty selections, infact the first time you boot up the game it doesn't even give you a main menu, it just shoots you straight into a series of cutscenes and then the game, something I didnt appreciate as I wanted to change the volume, graphics settings, resolution etc. The game sets its self up swiftly , showing that the main character Lincoln is a tall, hulking Vietnam Soldier recently returning home in New Orleans,  gets greeted and picked up by his friend that works in a local crime family/Mafia. Interlaced between this slow start are flashbacks or...flashforwards? To combat scenarios of you robbing banks, and all sorts various exciting scenes to kind of spice up the intro, which works well to keep the pacing. Ultimately, after these introductions, all of your Mobster friend and family gets betrayed and gunned down right before your eyes, you even get shot in the head yourself yet somehow miraculously survive. From there the game opens up where you're set on this plan to get revenge on those who did this to you. Its a good setup, its simple, easy to follow, and the characters are memorable and interesting.

The writing and narrative of the game doesn't shy away from politics, or even dare I say call the whole narrative of the game almost Leftist propaganda, which isn't nessesarily a good or bad thing. Games can have political agendas and try to forward a political message, as long as its to the service of the gameplay and overall narrative, and not just shoved in there for easy mass appeal. The game has a heavy focus on 1960's racism and Civil rights movements. Constantly you will have White characters saying racial slurs, calling you and your friends the N word, theres mature themes of slavery, the KKK, Confederate supremecist rednecks, and so on. More than anything, its just amusing how overblown and absurd it all is. If a genuine Conservative was playing this game, I'm sure they would think its all a strawman and big fake caricature of their side. But theres nothing wrong with a little satire in media, I found it all entertaining, amusing, funny, and kept me engaged in the story, characters, plot, etc. I did scoff a few times at how overtly it felt like the game was trying to push this leftist politics at me, as if like every White man in the 60's was an evil neo-nazi or something, but the gameplay and characters were engaging enough that it didn't really bother me. Now, I've heard people say they hate this game, it has like a 50% rating on steam, I was wondering why do people hate this game? Is it just because of the politics? I kept asking myself that question the whole time I was playing the game, waiting for the answer to reveal its self.

The general progression of the game is that you open the map, find a Story mission and drive to it. There is no fast travel! I think it was like this in the previous Mafia games, too. So you have to get accustomed to driving everywhere, everytime. I don't really mind it, really. When games like this have fast travel it almost makes the open world seem pointless. Why have this big open world if its more convenient to bypass most of it? Instead, in the Mafia games, they force you to live in this world and drive around and get familiar with the sights and sounds. Maybe its tolerable in part because of the Radio and soundtrack in the game. There are three radio stations, and since the game takes place in the 1960s Vietnam era, its a lot of Rolling Stones, those familliar almost cliche songs that play during any Vietnam themed media, such as Fortunate Son, Rock music, but also theres a decent amount of softer pop music like Sam Cooke, The Searchers, Roy Orbison, and stuff like Johnny Cash, and so on. The soundtrack kept the driving entertaining, just going through the various places in the detailed world, the game world has a lot of variety. Theres a section thats all swamps and Bayou, theres a Downtown section with all the city life, and skyscrapers, theres the more ghetto areas, its a fairly big map and often to drive to the next objective it will make you drive 2000+ meters and it takes a good 10+ minutes to get there. These long drives are also aided by the general high graphical fidelity of the game as well, the game is very colorful, the weather is dynamic, sometimes its dark and rainy, other times very bright, green sunny day.  The reflections on the ground when its wet out looks really good, with all the colors popping off the screen. The cars drive very weighty, almost every car accelerates slowly from 0-60, maybe because the game takes place in 60's so even by then a lot of the cars people are driving are older 30s,40s,50s cars. So most of the cars in the game are relatively slow to modern standards. If you get in a car crash at high speed, you even lose lots of health, further adding to the atmosphere and immersion.  Everytime you steal a car or do a crime, if anyone sees you it will say "Witness is calling cops" , but usually its OK because if you just leave the arena soon enough, you'll be outside the searching bubble and it wont be an issue. Just another detail to add to the living feeling of the world. There is a funny civilian behavior, where it seems like they dive far too often in front of your car. Something about their AI makes them frequently leap in front of your car, when they should be leaping the other way. Just thought that was amusing.

More about choosing story missions from the map screen: Its annoying how the DLC missions show up as "Story missions" that you can do anytime. It doesn't even indicate to you that they are optional DLC missions, or DLC at all! So I accidentally did one or two of these DLC missions without realizing. I don't like to do DLC stuff until I get the main campaign out of the way, I want to see what the developers released and were working on at release date, not stuff that was added way later. I just want to see the core experience first. So it was annoying and frustrating having to figure out how to avoid the DLC. Its because the HUD in general isn't designed very well.
Its bloated, ugly, hard to read, grey text on dark grey backgrounds, tiny fonts, too many bars upon bars, and still somehow has missing indicators. Like, where is my sprint bar? I beat the damn game and I still cant figure out how much stamina I have at any given moment. Theres a rear view car camera on the top when you drive...but whats the point, you can already press a button to look behind you. Immersion I guess? Well it breaks immersion having so much shit all over the screen. Theres a speedometer at the bottom, then a bunch of other bars ontop of it that I don't even know what its showing. Going across the bottom left is this little tiny bar trying to show you wallet money, bank money, grenades, etc. But again, the fonts and colors suck and are barely legible. The minimap is either too big or too small, it depends on resolution. The entire hud is a mess, and really needed some kind of option for adjusting the size or something.

As for the actual main missions themselves, theres a cycle to it. Actually not that many "Main missions" are unique events in themselves. Usually you just drive to some location, talk to someone, and then it starts up this Racket operation in the general area where it gives you a HUD indicator of "Damage remaining $$$"  and you have to go around the district and do these  reoccurring mini-missions to kill enemy gangs, destroy their various equipments, steal their money, and generally just do damage to their operations to make this HUD money indicator to go down to $0, at which point you go talk to a person and it opens up the actual unique main mission, usually just involving going to some mob bosses headquarters and killing him. Then, you own the location and have to decide which of your 3 companions to give it to. For the first handful of hours, I didn't even notice you could give it to other companions. It would just say something like "Location complete, press A to award to Cassandra" and show me a list of possible perks that doing this would unlock. I didnt notice that if you press a direction, you can award it to other companions. This whole empire asset management aspect of the game felt weird and sort of pointless? or incomplete. Like they wanted you to get the feeling you were becoming the Main Mafia boss, rewarding assets to people, but it felt a bit shallow. I get the impression the devs wanted you to care about this stuff a lot, but I barely noticed or cared. Each of the 3 companions has a different list of perks that get unlocked, if you keep giving these assets to them, Cassandra is stuff I found stupid and pointless, like these voodoo grenades? With extra smoke perks? but one of her main perks was more Rifle ammo, so I eventually got that from her, then stopped caring. Vito was obviously the best perk set, his was stuff like More maximum health, Fater health regen, and even being able to call in Hit squads at any time, which is a squad of a bunch of allied NPC's that gun down anyone you're fighting, at any time. These guys were super powerful, although I didn't use them much, the times I did use them proved to be very useful. Vito even has perks which make these squads stronger, ontop of his health boosting perks. The last companions perks seemed almost useless to me, just small things to temporarily get cops away from searching for you, but ONLY if they're in the blue circle phase, not when they're actively chasing you. Even the lowest tier of perks from Burke gets you this ability, his other perks just enhance it, make it last longer, or are perks related to vehicles that I didn't care much for. Theres all sorts of other stats about the assets, like how much money they're making, how much money each Companion is raking in, but I didn't really see the point of caring about any of it? I couldn't tell what it was changing. It wasn't like there was any turf wars that made you keep ontop of protecting your rackets, I never saw anything like that. They want you to care about this so much, that every now and again after completing enough main missions, you have a little sit down cutscene at your headquarters with all the companions, and you have to decide which district to give to which person. And they get really mad at you and talk shit if you ignore or neglect one of them. But in doing so, you can lose perks, like if Cassandra is bitching at me because I didn't give her a district enough times, the only way to make her stop is to give her a district, but in doing so, I'd temporarily lose for instance, my Maximum health perk from Vito, until I give him another racket. So obviously I care most about the Max health perk, not pleasing Cassandra, so I'd ignore her or Burk a few times -- well in doing so, she got so pissed at me and said "You ignored me three times now, I quit!"  or something to that effect - meaning I'd permanently lost her for the rest of the game, and unlocking anymore of her perks, infact I had to go do a side mission to kill her in order to even get back the ammo van ability, and keep the perks I'd already unlocked! I was kinda pissed about this and felt like I'd ruined my save, you cant load or go back or anything. I think there should of been some meter, or visual indication of how close I am to ruining her relationship, I was clueless what exactly was going to happen and it all happened abruptly. But it wasnt so bad afterall, just a minor setback. Luckily I already had all the perks I wanted from her anyway.

Now anyway, back onto the main missions and pacing of the game. Like I said previously, the game actually doesn't have an abundance of actual unique main missions. Its mostly this gameplay cycle and routine of going to a new arena, having to do these mini-quests where most of the time I'd just drive to a location, snipe one guy, and leave instantly. Or have to interrogate some guy, by beating on him and then he gives you more of these copy paste mini quests to progress by making the "Money Remaining $$$" damage meter on the HUD to go down. Since I heard that people hate this game, I'm wondering is this the reason why? They just hated how repetitive and lazy this style of progression is? Well yeah, it is repetitive, and yes it does seem lazy. But to me it wasn't that big of a deal. The gunplay is fun enough, the general gameplay is fun to engage with, I didn't mind all that much. Yes, a few times I was like "Ugh, this AGAIN?" like I was expecting something more, but I realized thats really what most of this game is. And I kind of just accepted it. The gameplay loop is what it is, unfortunately it doesn't have an abundance of extravagant, scripted, unique locations and missions, but the game isn't terrible in spite of that. Because its just a good Third person shooter, breaking into these enemy headquarters and either sneaking around or trying to figure out how to damage their stuff, assassinate the bosses, or whatever, is just kind of fun to do in general.
That's not to say the game doesn't have any unique scripted missions, it definitely does. They're just few and far between, and usually only after you do some major progression or plot point in the game, usually one after each time you've successfully damaged enough property on a turf and made the money go down to $0. One of the highlights of these unique missions was the Boat mission. This is a level Commando style you cause a giant explosion which disrupts this party Yacht where politicians and powerful influential people are, because you're hunting down the Uncle of the games Antagonist. This mission has the boat shaking all around, tossing the character around as he engages in combat, pedestrians falling off the boat and into the water like Titanic style, its just a fun mission thats a spectacle to behold. Another mission has you in a defense against waves of enemies, using a sniper, to eventually kill the Butcher, which was just a fine holdout style mission.  Another mission you have to assassinate a politician before he gets into his car, you can go into Slow-motion though so I sniped him through the window, then you have to get away from the cops. There's another mission where you go to a damn KKK rally and have to assassinate the main Klansman. And a few missions where you break into various places and rescue someone and have to get them out safely. So it does have exciting interesting moments in the main missions, but yeah for the most part you'll be doing a lot of almost copy+paste grinding in the districts doing these mini-quests to get to them. I was never bored or pissed at the game, though, really, I was pretty much entertained the whole time.

The gameplay has a surprising amount of mechanics. First and foremost its a Third Person Shooter. There is tons of combat in this game, moreso than most other Open world GTA games I've played. This is a very good thing to me! And the best part, is that the guns and combat is actually really fun. The graphics, and especially physics, are at times just amazing. Getting into gunfights is visceral, intense, and fun! Even the audio design: enemies are constantly yelling stuff at you, talking to eachother, saying their plans, its exciting hearing all the stuff they're saying. The combat is brutal, when you shoot the enemies, they have dramatic reactions where you can see the force of the bullets impact into their bodies a dynamic physics system takes over, its satisfying to engage in combat in this game, the physicality and brutality of the physics systems, gunplay, and enemy reactions is awesome. Most of the time if you shoot them once, they wont just keep fighting. They'll be staggered, stunned, holding their wound and muttering in pain, but they can recover after a handful of seconds. Often times if you shoot them and they go down, they'll be writhing around on the ground in pain bleeding out, the combat is disturbing, realistic, and shocking at times. Some of the death sounds and screaming sound effects get your blood pumping in the heat of combat, seeing  people all over the floor crying to their death, asking for their moma's and stuff like that. The only other game with such graphic, brutal combat and dramatic physics is maybe Max Payne 3. The guns feel good to use, they have a real punch of recoil and good sound effects. You can only carry two guns, a main gun, and a sidearm. And ammo is limited, only a couple dozen bullets for each. Which is a good thing, it turns into this calculated Risk/reward situation where you have to wonder if you have enough ammo to take them all out, if you should try Stealth (which is very powerful, but not overpowered, and the stealth has insane kill animations that alone is fun to watch) or should you go in guns blazing and pickup the enemies guns and ammo instead of dropping your main gun. Because you can find a gun you really like, but if you drop it, you might not get it back for many hours. Shortly into the game you unlock additional characters you work with, such as Cassandra, Vito, Thomas, and they give you additional perks and abilities. Such as in your weapon selection wheel, you can now call in extra services. One of these services is to call a van to your position (that arrives very quickly and conveniently) where you can refill ammo and buy new guns which get unlocked permanently to equip yourself with. But they cost a lot of money, so I had to pick carefully. I found that using Rifles was the best choice most of the time. So for basically the entire game, except the very beginning, I was using these single shot rifles, which I found really fun and effective. I don't mind the two weapon limit, it makes sense realistically to make the combat more grounded, and it adds to the immersion and intensity. I liked being forced to pickup subpar guns off the ground sometimes, when I was in a dire situation.

As for the health system, it uses regenerating health, except only regenerates each bracket. At first I think you have two health bars, if the second depletes it only regenerates the first one. Later on, you can unlock more health, up to a maximum of 5. I think thats a great way to handle regenerating health. The usual modern gaming standard of letting your health regenerate all the way is just too overpowered and easy. This bracket system, which I guess Halo introduced? Is a clever way to have some of the benefits but without making it too strong. To fully restore all your health bars, you have to use Adrenaline Shots,  basically health kits. You can find these in healthkit stations around the map, or you can buy them from the ammo van, which then these Adrenaline shots get stored on you until you press a button to use them. At first I think you can only hold two of them, but by the end of the game I had gotten so many perks I could hold 6 of them!

With this almost unforgiving health system in place, it adds even more to the intensity of the combat engagements. You can die very quickly, the enemy AI isn't stupid, either. They will frequently flank you, run straight up to you, do unpredictable things, toss Molotov's and grenades at you, snipe at you, coordinate flanks with their buddies, try to break your cover, etc. The game uses a Cover system, where you press a button to hide behind any piece of possible cover, and it works surprisingly well. Way better than other games I've played recently (Watch Dogs 2), this cover system is snappy, reliable, and fluid. You can blind fire, which is surprisingly helpful. You shoot over cover and since the enemies get stunned and react realistically by even just a stray bullet nipping them, it gives you some time to plan to jump to the next piece of cover if they're advancing towards you. The stealth system is quite basic, you just press a button to crouch, and as you move around you see little indicators of how much the enemy can see you, and if you get close enough you can press a button to instakill the enemy with a short but brutal animation. You can even pull them over objects, pull them behind walls, its quite dynamic and impressive the amount of ways you can get litle unique takedown animations. The stealth is quite forgiving too, almost too much, but it was fun to use sometimes so I actually bothered to use it besides just going guns blazing everytime.

Something the combat mechanics have that I've noticed other similar modern games share, is this Reinforcements ability that some enemies have. In this game they are called Sentry guards. They have a little icon above their head, and if you trigger them a big message pops up on screen "Sentry alerted" , now in other games (again..Watch Dogs 2) this can tend to suck, because in other games as soon as these guys hear you or see you, theyre calling endless waves of reinforcements, making combat in those games just downright annoying and almost pointless. However, in Mafia 3, its handled perfectly. When you alert a sentry, he has to actually run to a phone, dial it, and talk to someone. It gives you lots of time to track him down and take him out before he actually calls them in. This makes the whole mechanic a welcome and exciting addition, rather than a detriment. And when he does call in reinforcements, its only just one wave, not infinite waves like other games. So I'm happy this aspect of the combat was done right, and actually enhanced the gameplay rather than made it frustrating.

Not everything is designed mechanically great, though. The police for instance leaves something to be desired. For instance, as soon as the cops are after you, I found myself just letting them kill me most of the time instead of trying to take sometimes 10+ minutes trying to lose them. Why bother? Well, the reason is because the penalty for dying in this game is losing half of your held cash. But the thing is, as soon as the cops came after me, I would just press the button to bring the Bank car to me to deposit my cash, so now there was no penalty for death. So almost everytime the cops are after me, I instantly deposit my cash and let them kill me. Theres multiple reasons why I found the cop chases just a waste of time and annoying. For one, they pop your tires way too damn frequently. 9 out of 10 times youre in a cop chase, within the first 60 seconds almost all of your tires are popped! Its so stupid! Only until near the end of the game I actually noticed there was a perk you can get from the ammo van "Bullet proof tires" ...but I don't know, its still too frequent by default. And additionally, its just kind of too hard to lose the cops. I still don't know if theres any way to tell what 'Wanted level' I have. There doesnt seem to be anything on the HUD indicating what strength the cops are at? Its like all or nothing? I dont know. So even a cop watching me steal a random car, felt like the same force as cops after me on a murder spree - Or I couldn't tell the exact strength so I was left wondering how long this escape would take. And it seems like if you stay on the main roads, the cops will just always keep up with you. Its like the only way to actually lose them is to try to pop their tires in return, which obviously driving and shooting should be clunky, but theres this weird lockon system that I kind of fumble with where you can lock onto their tires , which sometimes works, but most of all I just didnt want to bother. The only other option is to try to go off road or go on foot in some back alleys, but who knows how long this could take. Again, why go through all this instead of just deposit my cash and let them kill me, then respawn nearby. Only a couple missions in the game had mandatory cop chases where you have to escape to finish the mission, most of the times I got caught by police was when I was just freeroaming in the world trying to do things to progress to the next main mission.


The game is easy to play for long stretches, I don't know if its due to the atmosphere, music, the lack of free travel, the general gameplay cycle, sometimes I could play it for 5 hours! it just sucks you in, I guess. I actually was engaged in the main plotline, the characters like Donovan, which is this CIA agent that was your buddy in Vietnam (I think?) that helps you throughout the whole game, he always has wacky antics happening in his cutscenes, constantly chainsmoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, hes just like a reliable buddy the whole game which you turn to for more information on what to do next. Then you have Father James, this Priest character thats supposed to be like this figure of moral authority and righteousness in the narrative, but I found him kind of annoying and does nothing but act sentimental, mope, and say trite platitudes the whole game. Still, it was fun to watch his antics. Interspliced through these narratives you have the 3 underbosses and their dramas, the Irish Burke being a hard ass, having a fucked up knee waddling around, you have the main antagonists constantly saying all sorts of racist stuff, just the general things said and done in the game is a curosity. Hate it or not, being sent on missions where you're facing off against stereotypical rednecks sometimes wearing fucking bags on their heads, scribbling White power graffiti on the walls, with rebel flags - its just not dull. I found it easy to be entertained by the game, even if its absurd. I appreciated how mature the whole game felt, it doen't feel like something kids should be playing. I even liked the main character, hes stoic, doesn't fuck around, isn't all emotional or pissy, he just gets shit down and the whole game it feels like you're on a damn mission, just like Vietnam. He has that Veteran mentality about him, even wearing this cool Army outfit as his default look. I was curious whenever a cutscene played, I genuinely didn't want to miss any bits of story or dialogue, I found it pretty enjoyable and fun to keep up with.

The main gripes I have with the game is the lack of unique main missions, the copy pasted repetitive mini-missions, the bad HUD, sometimes it can be hard and ambiguous to figure out what the next main mission is, theres not really any coherent structure of the pacing of the game, you kind of just go to an area on the map do stuff there. At one point I realized I'm doing content for a part of the map that probably should be happening at a way later stage, it was kind of hard to figure out what to do next sometimes. The DLC showing up on the main map as any other story mission without any indication that its DLC didn't add to that. More gripes is some of the police stuff with the shooting tires too much, the sub-par design choices with the money and annoyingly having to call in this bank car every 5 minutes to preserve your cash, Something I didn't figure out until many hours into the game. It could of been explained better to the player. But besides that I didn't really have many complaints. Maybe I would of liked if there was a way to fast travel, SOME way, maybe having to drive to a train station and take you halfway there? I don't know, probably half of the game is spent driving to and from places, its quite arduous sometimes. The game is very forgiving with checkpoints and stuff, so I wasn't very frustrated that much, and usually when I died it was completely my fault for playing stupid and trying to speedrun past a section or something.

So I'm still left wondering, why does this game have such a bad reputation? Is it really just people crying about how "SJW" the narrative is? Its not that big of a deal, just enjoy it for what it is, take it as satire if you want, I liked the gameplay enough to not be bothered, and despite the politician overtones, I still enjoyed the narrative and the characters. If its not the politics, then do people hate the game for the repetitive mini-missions? I didn't mind it either, because the game has awesome gunplay. Some other open world games you barely even get in shootouts. Like Mafia 1 doesnt actually have that many fighting sections, this game actually barely had any vehicle chases. Maybe thats another gripe, theres not enough vechile exclusive missions. Theres hardly any vehicle chases in Mafia 3, it really is just a straight up Third Person Shooter, I like that kind of thing, I was actually really happy to find out this game has such a big focus on the shooting , because they nailed it with the gameplay in that department. So its like they went all in on one aspect, and kind of ignored some of the other ones like Vehicle sections, but its fine to me. Still, I had a pretty fun time with Mafia 3, it wasnt that long or worn out its welcome, I didn't really do a single Optional mission, I just stuck to the main story and it took me 20 hours to complete,  which is perfect to me for an Open world game like this. I had a good time, I don't know what everyone elses problem is with this game. Underrated.

7/10