Mafia: Definitive Edition talks without saying anything. The atmosphere, the presentation and the ambience is almost perfect for a title based on the 30s, with a very good story that unites the pack. Not much to do in its open world, it's not just empty, it's also nonexistent for all the story mode, which structure is a linear list of missions one after the other. I thought it had an open world between those, like normally these games have, but it doesn't. That, incidentally, helped me to get more invested on the story and focused on finish it instead of keep losing my time between side content and side content. They could've just filled the world with tons of content to do and all, but decided not to, and I think that was for the better.
Mechanics are on the obsolete side even for 2020, but that's the consecuence of being a remake maybe too faithful in structure to the original game, and even if it was interesting to keep the simulation option for car physics, traffic rules and police understanding of we, as a player, breaking those rules or not but ultimately you can disable them and it doesn't even matter and sometimes they kind of bug out and don't work properly, which is a shame, but yeah, they're more of a reference than anything but it's a nice touch. That really shows how the original developers of the 2002 game wanted you to feel that Tommy Angelo, the protagonist, was really the guy behind the wheel of the crew. There are a lot of mechanics pointing to that in the original that, sadly, are not presented here or at least not with the same weight. Sure, there are quite a bunch of cars from that age and you can see how they change a little bit from the start of the game to the end, where it goes from 1930 to 1938, and there are info about them from power to weight but it just doesn't feel the same. Physics are nice, tho.
Shooting is also kind of lacking here. First, we're talking about a cover shooter that is solid but nothing spectacular. That's okay, but then the shooting itself... it just feels kind of wrong, especially with the Thompson. Aiming feels off a lot of times. Also there are not many weapons in the game, which makes everything a little bit repetitive. At least the cover system is okay enough for the shooting to be fun and if you just use the excuse that it's the 30s and weapons were bad, you can ignore the issues with the gunplay. I don't know.
Story is really good. Pacing and rhythm is nice for the most part. The script is well written and there are quite a variety of situations. I mean, sometimes you're stealing diamonds from Customs and sometimes you're racing an F1 car in the local circuit and for a game this short, 10 hours or so, that's a plus in my book. Characters feel real but sometimes Tommy's decisions are out of character and overall I felt like the game didn't really try very hard to have likeable characters for the player to care about. So that was kind of disappointed but you can't have everything, right?
Sound design and music is cool enough to be noticeable and that's great. Music sometimes can be repetitive and having only two radio stations but I mean, it's the 30s, what can you expect. I liked how if you drive inside a tunnel you almost lose the radio signal, that's a great detail. Shots sometimes bug out and won't sound in that parking mission but yeah, it's well done.
And that's it. It's a short game and that helps it to be more condensed and focused on the story, its selling point. Not exactly what I expected but not a bad thing at all. Definitely this is not trying to be a GTA clone of any sort but a love letter for all the original Mafia fans out there.
Mechanics are on the obsolete side even for 2020, but that's the consecuence of being a remake maybe too faithful in structure to the original game, and even if it was interesting to keep the simulation option for car physics, traffic rules and police understanding of we, as a player, breaking those rules or not but ultimately you can disable them and it doesn't even matter and sometimes they kind of bug out and don't work properly, which is a shame, but yeah, they're more of a reference than anything but it's a nice touch. That really shows how the original developers of the 2002 game wanted you to feel that Tommy Angelo, the protagonist, was really the guy behind the wheel of the crew. There are a lot of mechanics pointing to that in the original that, sadly, are not presented here or at least not with the same weight. Sure, there are quite a bunch of cars from that age and you can see how they change a little bit from the start of the game to the end, where it goes from 1930 to 1938, and there are info about them from power to weight but it just doesn't feel the same. Physics are nice, tho.
Shooting is also kind of lacking here. First, we're talking about a cover shooter that is solid but nothing spectacular. That's okay, but then the shooting itself... it just feels kind of wrong, especially with the Thompson. Aiming feels off a lot of times. Also there are not many weapons in the game, which makes everything a little bit repetitive. At least the cover system is okay enough for the shooting to be fun and if you just use the excuse that it's the 30s and weapons were bad, you can ignore the issues with the gunplay. I don't know.
Story is really good. Pacing and rhythm is nice for the most part. The script is well written and there are quite a variety of situations. I mean, sometimes you're stealing diamonds from Customs and sometimes you're racing an F1 car in the local circuit and for a game this short, 10 hours or so, that's a plus in my book. Characters feel real but sometimes Tommy's decisions are out of character and overall I felt like the game didn't really try very hard to have likeable characters for the player to care about. So that was kind of disappointed but you can't have everything, right?
Sound design and music is cool enough to be noticeable and that's great. Music sometimes can be repetitive and having only two radio stations but I mean, it's the 30s, what can you expect. I liked how if you drive inside a tunnel you almost lose the radio signal, that's a great detail. Shots sometimes bug out and won't sound in that parking mission but yeah, it's well done.
And that's it. It's a short game and that helps it to be more condensed and focused on the story, its selling point. Not exactly what I expected but not a bad thing at all. Definitely this is not trying to be a GTA clone of any sort but a love letter for all the original Mafia fans out there.