Review: Mafia 3 fails to meet its potential

Platforms: PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One, and PC.

Developer: Hanger 13

Publisher: 2K Games

MSRP: $59.99

Introduction:

Mafia 3 was one of my most anticipated games of 2016. I absolutely loved Mafia 2, both from a story and gameplay perspective, and after waiting nearly 6 years I was ready to return to the series. Leading up to launch, I got more and more excited, I knew there was no way this game could be a disappointment! Well, that was probably a mistake on my part. Mafia 3 is a phenomenal game from a story and gameplay standpoint, but it is one of the worst performing games since Assassin’s Creed: Unity on a technical level. For now, let’s focus on the positives and we will revisit some of those negatives near the end of this review.

The premise of Mafia 3:

Mafia 3’s story is one of the best stories in a game this year. It's well-crafted, presented in a unique way, it takes risks and has some great characters that will make your emotions run wild thanks to brilliant performances by their actors.

This open world crime drama is about Lincoln Clay, an African American man who has returned from the war in Vietnam in the 1960’s. He comes home to Louisiana and is roped back into a life of crime with his brother, Ellis, and adoptive father, Sammy, who make up part of the black mob. Lincoln finds out Ellis and Sammy, are in deep with the Italian mob. Lincoln must help the two dig their way out of this hole by pulling off a heist for the Italian’s. Sadly, things don’t work out as they were supposed to and some tragic events unfold leaving Lincoln with a bullet in the side of his head and Sammy and Ellis six feet under (don’t worry, this all happens within the first hour and is featured heavily in the trailers). Lincoln sets out for revenge against the Italians in the only way he knows how, destroying everything they’ve built and killing every single person linked to the leader, Sal Marcano.

The story is told from Lincoln’s perspective for most of the game but after certain major story points, the game will cut to interviews and court testimonies from characters in the game. There is an unknown group of characters who set out to make a documentary about Lincoln Clay and his thirst for Italian blood which sets up future events in the story as well as provide a sense of mystery to Lincoln’s fate since the documentary takes place decades after the game.

A diverse cast of characters that bring a wide range of emotions:

They interview characters like Lincoln’s spiritual advisor and other father figure, Father James. Father James is easily one of the best characters in the game. He brings so much emotion to the game, he wants the best for Lincoln and he doesn’t want to see him get killed or go so far down this dark path that he can’t come back from it. He’s afraid Lincoln will end up becoming exactly like Sal Marcano and the people he is setting out to stop. He brings a moral balance to Lincoln for the most part and you can see his struggle to keep Lincoln in check and it broke my heart as a player to see his disappointment and witness how hurt he was over decisions you would make. Near the end of the game, I got pretty choked up because I could tell I let him down and you could hear the pain in his voice and see it in his face. While I didn’t fully regret my actions in the game, I kind of wished some things could’ve been different so I could take that pain away from Father James. The man who played the character does such an astonishing job of making you feel regretful, guilty, and sad that he should be given some sort of award for his performance.

The other characters in the game are amazing as well! Sal Marcano and his group of Italian mafia leaders are despicable and, as sadistic as it sounds, it’s incredibly satisfying to work your way through them and kill some of them in horrifically violent ways. The deaths in these games will be things that will stick with you for a long time due to some of the cinematic imagery they use that successfully burns images into your head.

Another great character is Donovan, a buddy of Lincoln’s from the war. He’s a CIA operative who steps in to help out Lincoln get intel on the Italian mafia and plan out ways to take them down. He brings out a much needed light side of Lincoln and brings some great humor to the game while also being such a charismatic, badass, wise guy himself. He is easily up there with Father James as one of the best supporting characters in a video game this year. I highly recommend watching the scene that plays after the credits of the game if you really want to see how fantastic his character is.

The last group of characters I’ll talk about is your lieutenants. These three characters are your fire power against Sal Marcano. They provide you with resources like weapons, character upgrades, backup, and more in return for some control over land and businesses in New Bordeaux, the fictionalized version of New Orleans in the game. Your lieutenants are Cassandra, an African-American woman whose family has been wronged significantly by Marcano, Vito Scaletta, the main character from Mafia 2 who was working with Sal until he was screwed over and Sal tried to take him out of the picture, and Thomas Burke, an alcoholic Irishman whose son was murdered by Marcano and had his leg crippled after he did a job for Marcano. Each person has a personal stake in this quest for Marcano’s life and they will help you in any way they can, as long as you don’t try screwing them over.

A new direction for the series:

Mafia 3’s story takes the series in a new direction by not focusing on the Italian’s so heavily and bringing in different walks of life. Not everyone you know is family, you don’t all have the same accent, it’s not just a repeat of the same story. Although Mafia 2’s story was excellent and was reminiscent of a Scorsese film like Goodfellas, it’s a welcome change. It invokes a new sense of “family” without having everyone be blood-related or have some sort of racial connection. You build relationships and get to know these people’s background stories the more you work with them, and you see these dark places these people come from. I was constantly eager to learn more about each and every character in the game because they have so much depth to them.

It also isn’t a game where you perform odd jobs for crime families, it’s really quite the opposite. This is Lincoln’s story, no one is in charge of him, he is on a quest for revenge. While I do wish there was more mission variety, the game does a pretty good job of changing the formula of the Mafia series. If it was fleshed out more (which I expect will be done in a sequel), it could be absolutely fantastic.

An immersive world that doesn't shy away from showing the harsh realities of the time period:

The story in Mafia 3 also works so well because of its willingness to take risks. It’s not afraid to show brutal violence or controversial subjects such as racism, human trafficking, and other dark topics. It doesn’t sugar coat anything and it also doesn’t try to force anything like the race issues by shoving it down your throat with an unrealistic portrayal of people and society being the worst possible racists out there. There are characters like that, but they don’t make it the main focal point of the story which was a concern for many leading up the release. People worried the game would try to make some sort of a political statement in a big way and that it would take away from the game or it would be annoying, but it's not like that. It gets its point across, but in a very tasteful way without taking away from Lincoln’s story and his quest for revenge. Characters will say things like the N-word or other derogatory terms and you will see some things that may make some people pretty uncomfortable, but it’s all historically accurate for the setting of the game and it opens your eyes to even some of the issues in today’s society.

The game does a great job of building a world divided on race. Cops will respond differently to crimes depending on which neighborhood you are in; if you steal a car in a predominately white neighborhood, cops will respond to 911 calls much faster and deadlier than they would if you did something in a rundown part of the town stricken with poverty and people of color. It’s things like this that help immerse you in the world and make it feel alive and not like there’s just some miscellaneous NPCs scattered around with no purpose. People will react differently to you, may shout things at you, and some businesses in the game have a strict 'no colored people' allowed rule where if you walk in they will harass you until you leave – if you don’t leave they end up calling the police.

It gives you a true feeling of oppression and makes you sympathize with Lincoln and other people of color throughout the game, you could play the game and probably not realize most of the things as they’re pretty little and minor but they help flesh out the world in a unique way I have never seen in a game before. One other little touch I noticed was the radio in the game reports on events both related to Lincoln’s actions and completely unrelated. For example, early in the game you will begin to hear things about a man who shot two black kids on his lawn and throughout the game you will hear people inside conversations and on the radio debate what should happen to the killer and if he should be convicted of two racially motivated murders or if it was self-defense like he claims. It adds a fantastic layer to the game that makes the world feel lived in and like there are things happening beyond your story.

Where is the side content?

The only bad thing about the world itself is that there’s literally nothing to do outside of the missions which have VERY little variety to them (we will come back to this). You can’t buy clothes, participate in mini-games like poker or darts, there’s nothing to buy with your money besides weapons and supplies like ammo and armor, there is absolutely nothing to do outside of the missions besides drive around. I opened my map once I beat the game and looked at it for a few seconds and thought to myself “Well, what now?” as I had already completed the very few side missions in the game. Since I beat the game on Monday morning, I haven’t gone back to it because I have nothing left to do aside for some trophies to earn. Lots of people complained about the lack of things to do in Mafia 2, but there are even less things to do here. They actually removed things like going to get gas, eating food at diners, and buying clothes! They removed every little thing you could do and made the world bare and dry in terms of side activities. Hopefully, they will add more things in future expansion packs and free updates, they have promised races and more customization in the near future but it’s a bit frustrating it wasn’t included in the game at launch.

Excellent gameplay with a soundtrack of iconic songs to go along with it:

For the most part, the gameplay in Mafia 3 is excellent! The driving is exhilarating and feels like something straight out of a fast paced 70’s action film, the combat is brutal and fun to partake in, but there are also some faults.

The driving in the game is brilliantly executed. There’s nothing like driving a muscle car and hearing its engine roar as you turn corners at high speeds by drifting, hearing your tires screech and watching as you leave a trail of smoke behind you. There is so much mobility in the car, but it doesn’t feel unrealistic. The cars feel as if they have some weight to them and each car handles differently, so you have to account for that in car chases so you know when to slow down or brake in order to be able to turn a corner and not fly directly into a brick wall or a sidewalk of civilians. You can make the driving even more realistic by turning on an option in the settings called “Simulated driving” which makes your driving slightly more difficult.

The soundtrack that plays while you’re driving is exquisite, it perfectly captures the era you’re in. It’s a nice mix of genres that were becoming incredibly popular with classic rock and roll songs from CCR and Rolling Stones and genres that were beginning to be sort of less popular upon everyone like jazz and soul music. It has such a sprawling soundtrack and introduced me to some great new tracks that I went and added to my Spotify after hearing them. Mafia 3 also does a great job of using these licensed songs in scripted scenarios outside of just driving by playing them during big scenes both in cut scenes and gameplay, giving the game an even more cinematic feel. The way the songs are used brought a huge smile to my face as most of the time it was used to sort of pump you up and get you ready for a big battle or set piece that was about to occur.

Speaking of big set piece moments and battles, the combat is so great in Mafia 3. The melee attacks are brutal as they mix up basic one-two combos with Lincoln’s military training with visceral attacks like flipping a guy onto the ground and then putting your boot on his face and crushing his neck with the weight of your foot or putting a shotgun to someone’s stomach and blowing them away into a body of water to be eaten by alligators lurking in the murky waters. You can use stealth to sneak through areas to get to a target you need to take out without alerting them to your presence or you can go guns blazing and destroy everyone and everything in your sight. It feels absolutely perfect, even after you do it hundreds of times since the mission structure is repetitive and has a lack of variety.

A lack of mission variety:

There are basically three types of missions in the game. Going to the bayou and getting resources like drugs, weapons, and moonshine for one of your lieutenants and driving back a hell of a long way to the city, destroying the Italian’s rackets by stealing stashes of their drugs and cash, blowing up valuable things, or killing important targets. Then finally, there's going and killing the head honchos of the Italian mafia which is usually fighting through a ton of enemies in big set piece missions while crazy events unfold around you like fighting on a ferry that is in the midst of sinking and exploding. After 20-30+ hours of this, it gets boring, especially because there’s nothing to do in-between to relax and take your mind off the chaos. It's constantly kill, kill, kill. You blow through so much ammo in this game and kill so many people it’s insane. If the gameplay wasn’t as good as it is, I probably would’ve stopped playing but I don’t know if I would’ve been able to play this as much as I did.

The game has a plethora of bugs and glitches:

One of the faults of the gameplay though is the AI. The AI is laughably bad, you can murder someone 20 feet away from someone who is looking directly at you and they won’t notice, they’ll give up on searching for you and forget you exist directly after blowing up a whole warehouse of cars if you just go and hide for a bit, and don’t even get me started on some of their driving skills. I witnessed so many NPCs just drive directly into other cars, trees, and walls and just continue driving into them for several minutes before I would just walk away because the AI couldn’t figure out how to drive away. They would hit an object, back up a few feet, hit it again, and then do the same thing over and over again and would never stop until I left. For all I know, some of those NPCs are still there to this day in that same cycle, hitting a brick wall over and over again! I once knocked out an owner of a diner who was calling the police on me and a waitress witnessed it and she walked up to his unconscious body and said “Well, that’s an odd place to take a nap!” and then just walked away! She had no care that I just literally choked out her boss and left his body lying in the open!

Amongst the AI are an unbelievable number of glitches. This is probably the worst game in terms of graphical consistency, glitches, and bugs since Assassin’s Creed: Unity. I’m not sure if it’s on the same level of Unity but it is damn close. There were glitches that literally caused me to fail missions and some would make me stop the game and just make me sit there in awe of how broken the game is. It doesn’t cease to amaze me whenever I see a new glitch. I randomly caught fire and died once, I saw an unoccupied car glitch out so hard it flung around and killed three enemies and then flew away into a nearby river as if it was running away from the scene of the crime, and I couldn’t progress through a mission because I needed to steal a car and it when I arrived to steal it, it had another car’s hood stuck through the middle of it and it was colliding with it, doing damage and causing sparks to fly out of it, making it unusable.

The way the game runs is also very poor, I played on PS4 so this wasn’t a concern of mine, but the PC version was locked at 30 FPS at launch which is just unacceptable. People spend thousands of dollars on computers to run games at the highest of settings, but then buy an already broken game and are limited to 30 FPS? That’s absurd, if anything, delay the PC version a week or two to get it working properly.

A poorly optimized mess:

On PS4, however, the graphics are inconsistent. Sometimes the game looks drop dead gorgeous, just absolutely stunning! The cutscenes showcase this in a very big way as they are pre-rendered and show off how great the game can look! Then you’ll be playing and the lighting will be off, or the textures look like a PC game running on low settings, or something else will just cause internal frustration because you know that the game can look good, it’s just poorly optimized. I was driving in a big storm in the game one time and then all of a sudden it was broad daylight, the rain didn’t slowly stop and there was no transition from the clouds parting from the sun. It was just sunshine as if there was no storm at all. It was bizarre and it took me a moment to wrap my head around it. The pop-in is also terrible, there’s little to no draw distance for a game made in 2016. I would be driving and the city would just start loading in right ahead of me, it really took me out of the immersive world they spent so much time building and expanding on.

It made me wonder why Mafia 3 hadn’t been delayed, it really made the game feel like a disappointment for me even though I loved the story. It is so bogged down by glitches that it made me incredibly angry because I was really rooting for this game and I told so many people ahead of time that this was a game to keep watch for. It makes me wonder if Hanger 13 wanted to delay the game but 2K wouldn’t allow them because they didn’t want to push it into the busy space of late October or November or even 2017 because Take-Two has plans for Rockstar’s new game and they didn’t want Mafia 3 to be overshadowed by Rockstar or whatever plans Take-Two has, but that’s just pure speculation.

Verdict:

Mafia 3 could’ve been 2016’s best game thanks to excellent and immersive world building, a fantastic story, and near flawless gameplay, but it’s sadly weighed down by so many glitches and bugs that it make me question why this game wasn’t delayed. It feels unpolished and like it’s in an alpha or beta stage. It’s one thing to see a game so buggy, but it’s even more frustrating when you know that the game has potential and really truly could’ve been better if given more time. You get glimmers of “Wow, this game is incredible!” and then something stupid happens which takes you out of the experience and makes you realize the game was rushed.

I’m glad Mafia 3 also took the series in a new direction and there's hope they can expand upon this direction in expansion packs and a sequel with or without Lincoln Clay. Hopefully, they’ll take some of these criticisms to heart and go back to the drawing board and give us more mission variety while also keeping the things that worked well in the title.

Hanger 13 is a very talented studio and I hope they don’t get pushed under the rug for this bumpy release. I would love to see where they take the series next and I hope they get another shot at it and are given more time to develop it.

Once the game drops in price or they fix a good chunk of the issues with the game, I would highly recommend purchasing Mafia 3.

Note: We will revisit the game in a couple months to see if any fixes have been implemented.