This review contains spoilers
I played on hard difficulty with simulation driving. I completed the main story, all the races, and the Faster, Baby! DLC.
This game is really bad. Going in, the main thing I heard about the game was that the missions are repetitive and man, that is a fucking understatement. Essentially, our goal is to kill the big bad mobster, but to do that we have to take care of each of his underbosses, and to get at each of them we have to take care of the people under them and so on, until it gets to we have to do a series of EXTREMELY repetitive tasks in order to get at the lowest level boss. Every task is basically go up to a place and there's bad guys there. There is essentially no variation on this. This shit reminded me of Assassin's Creed 1. The main story missions feel like throwaway filler side quests in an open world game. And then I checked out one of the side quests and it was even more side-quest-y (go find me 3 of this kind of car). Once you've done enough shitty filler missions, you go fight through a bunch of guys to kill whatever boss and then repeat the whole process. After the prologue, there's only a few levels that feel like any thought at all was put into them. And at its core, it's just a mediocre third person shooter. The shooting felt frustrating more often than it felt fun.
The story really fits the gameplay in that it is also terrible. We start with an interesting prologue that sets up our protagonist's motivation for revenge, and we end with enacting said revenge, having become the biggest mob boss in town, and then getting to choose if we stay and replace what we destroyed, or leave and put all this behind us. That's all good, but for the middle 18 hours there's basically nothing. Like Assassin's Creed 1, it's just a loop of "we gotta kill this guy but first we gotta do all these tasks", and after you go through that a few times you get a BIG GUY to kill but none of these people are characters that matter, they're just levels. And Marcano, the big bad boss, doesn't really seem to care or fight back at any point. We don't get any interaction with him since the prologue. The game fails to make me care about any of the characters or any of the plot. Even in an emotional scene where I've had to kill one of my underbosses because they turned against me because I didn't give them any districts, I do not care. Way too much of this game is people talking about shit I couldn't care less about.
Our protagonist, Lincoln Clay, is not interesting. Most of his loved ones got killed by Marcano and so he's getting revenge by killing Marcano (which requires killing a LOT of other people first). And that's basically it. Lincoln's never remorseful about all the people he's killing on his quest. He never grapples with whether he's worse than his enemies. And I don't really care about him. He's a pretty bad guy.
Every time I play a game like this it baffles me how a developer could possibly think this is good. At least AC1 was the first in the series. They improved that shit right away. This is Mafia THREE and so much of it feels like a shitty first draft. Like ya okay he works his way through dismantling Marcano's organization racket by racket. That's a good idea, but we can't just be doing the same shit over and over. Let's go back to the writer's room and try to come up with some interesting things to happen in the game please.
Now for some positives. The game looks pretty good, but there's a lot of pop-in to the point that it's consistently distracting. The radio is nothing but bangers. The simulation driving is great, and the races are fun, so much so that I did them all, and I rarely do optional content when I dislike a game this much. I accidentally did the Faster, Baby! DLC story (the DLC missions are presented as main story missions) and that was good. It was right after a major milestone in the game, so I was hopeful that only the first part of the game was garbage and the rest of the game would be good like that mission. Oh how wrong I was.
Overall this game is incredibly disappointing. There's a fair amount of potential in it. I could imagine a game where the way you take down the mob, choosing which rackets to take down and which underbosses to give them to, and the mob striking back at you in different ways depending on your decisions is all very interesting and strategic, but that isn't this game. This game is bad.
This game is really bad. Going in, the main thing I heard about the game was that the missions are repetitive and man, that is a fucking understatement. Essentially, our goal is to kill the big bad mobster, but to do that we have to take care of each of his underbosses, and to get at each of them we have to take care of the people under them and so on, until it gets to we have to do a series of EXTREMELY repetitive tasks in order to get at the lowest level boss. Every task is basically go up to a place and there's bad guys there. There is essentially no variation on this. This shit reminded me of Assassin's Creed 1. The main story missions feel like throwaway filler side quests in an open world game. And then I checked out one of the side quests and it was even more side-quest-y (go find me 3 of this kind of car). Once you've done enough shitty filler missions, you go fight through a bunch of guys to kill whatever boss and then repeat the whole process. After the prologue, there's only a few levels that feel like any thought at all was put into them. And at its core, it's just a mediocre third person shooter. The shooting felt frustrating more often than it felt fun.
The story really fits the gameplay in that it is also terrible. We start with an interesting prologue that sets up our protagonist's motivation for revenge, and we end with enacting said revenge, having become the biggest mob boss in town, and then getting to choose if we stay and replace what we destroyed, or leave and put all this behind us. That's all good, but for the middle 18 hours there's basically nothing. Like Assassin's Creed 1, it's just a loop of "we gotta kill this guy but first we gotta do all these tasks", and after you go through that a few times you get a BIG GUY to kill but none of these people are characters that matter, they're just levels. And Marcano, the big bad boss, doesn't really seem to care or fight back at any point. We don't get any interaction with him since the prologue. The game fails to make me care about any of the characters or any of the plot. Even in an emotional scene where I've had to kill one of my underbosses because they turned against me because I didn't give them any districts, I do not care. Way too much of this game is people talking about shit I couldn't care less about.
Our protagonist, Lincoln Clay, is not interesting. Most of his loved ones got killed by Marcano and so he's getting revenge by killing Marcano (which requires killing a LOT of other people first). And that's basically it. Lincoln's never remorseful about all the people he's killing on his quest. He never grapples with whether he's worse than his enemies. And I don't really care about him. He's a pretty bad guy.
Every time I play a game like this it baffles me how a developer could possibly think this is good. At least AC1 was the first in the series. They improved that shit right away. This is Mafia THREE and so much of it feels like a shitty first draft. Like ya okay he works his way through dismantling Marcano's organization racket by racket. That's a good idea, but we can't just be doing the same shit over and over. Let's go back to the writer's room and try to come up with some interesting things to happen in the game please.
Now for some positives. The game looks pretty good, but there's a lot of pop-in to the point that it's consistently distracting. The radio is nothing but bangers. The simulation driving is great, and the races are fun, so much so that I did them all, and I rarely do optional content when I dislike a game this much. I accidentally did the Faster, Baby! DLC story (the DLC missions are presented as main story missions) and that was good. It was right after a major milestone in the game, so I was hopeful that only the first part of the game was garbage and the rest of the game would be good like that mission. Oh how wrong I was.
Overall this game is incredibly disappointing. There's a fair amount of potential in it. I could imagine a game where the way you take down the mob, choosing which rackets to take down and which underbosses to give them to, and the mob striking back at you in different ways depending on your decisions is all very interesting and strategic, but that isn't this game. This game is bad.