If you've ever wondered what it was like to make a recipe if your only ingredients were Elmer's glue, sandpaper, molasses, Surströmming, and SPAM, Mafia has the answer for you.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, Mafia is one of the worst playing experiences I've ever had with a video game in two plus decades of cognizantly experiencing the medium.

This game sucks to play, it sucks to exist in, it sucks to look at, it sucks. Mafia is the Plan 9 from Outer Space of video games. None of it is enjoyable, not even one second did I have fun. There were no moments in its [insert hours played here] runtime did I smile and say "isn't this great?" It sucks, it's cheeks. It is BOOTY.

Why? Why you may ask? Now conceptually lets take a rich subject that's been perhaps done before in media like the Italian Mafia. You have your gold standards in Goodfellas and The Godfather that already exist, but those are movies (well, also books) and as of 2002 there has yet to be an acclaimed mob story in the video game space. Picture yourself rising up the ranks from a cab driver to respected lieutenant in a New Jersey outfit of said criminal organization, documenting your quick rise and greed-driven fall from grace. That could be good, it may have been done before, but it has the capacity to be a solid story as long as the world is established well, the characters well put together, and the game plays smoothly. Does it do any of that? Absolutely not!

Lived in. Immersion. Realistic.

Buzz words that developers in the medium have chased in creating worlds that players can lose themselves in to grasp their stories with a heightened fervor. This succeeds in modern titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 or the Like a Dragon franchise because the rules of the game, on top of some crisp visual fidelity, allow you to traverse and feel like a character within the world. In Red Dead your methodical horse riding takes you therapeutically from point a to point b across the western United States. In Like a Dragon you run neck and neck with the citizens of the ever-so-busy city streets of Japan's supercities (well, and Hawaii eventually) while the glistening lights and brights of buildings around you beam into your eyes. In Mafia, you are arrested for going over forty miles per hour when you drive. Radar timing, something not even invented at the time the game takes place (the early to late 1930's,) is apparently beamed into the heads of every police officer in Hoboken and the surrounding area. Are you going slightly too fast? Have to pause for a traffic stop. Are you about to finish a mission? Too bad! Did you run a red light? Traffic stop! Did a police officer step on your car and fall off? You're arrested! Are you in a high speed chase as part of a mission, where your car is being shot up by three enemy vehicles but are going slightly too fast? Cops will pull you over and arrest you while there are four shotguns aimed at your vehicle and actively shooting. This absolutely nukes any immersion you can have. Look, I get this game is from over two decades ago but there's absolutely no plausibility of a 1930's New Jersey you could have in moments like this. You have no space to think about the reality these characters could exist in, only time to express anger at the excessively flawed mechanical state of the game.

Nothing works. Quests bug out all the time, enemies will t-pose and halt progress, you will clip through buildings in the middle of pivotal quest chains, and Mafia will outright crash one to two times per play session.

I have multiple clips saved of my run that I've already spent too long laughing at. One of them, several people within an important cutscene in which a key politician is making a speech have heads replaced with gas canisters. In a second, I spent an entire half lap during the game's mandatory racetrack segment on my vehicle sideways because it wouldn't flip. In another I was tasked with taking two allies on a mission towards the ending sequencing of the game, one gets in the car and the other endlessly does loops around the garage. I wanted to see how long he'd go but he literally didn't stop, he just kept... looping.

Mafia is bad, full stop. Shooting feels bad, enemies are bullet sponges (sometimes taking twelve to eighteen bullets,) there's no controller support on PC, it's a buggy mess, the world is actively hostile in the penalties given to traversal, the VA is awful, and the writing is poor. This was not worth the price of free I got from claiming it on Steam. Play literally anything else.