Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51~100
101.
Rayman 2: The Great Escape (N64)
102.
Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa (Famicom)
103.
Panic Restaurant (NES)
104.
Mr. Gimmick (NES)
105.
Bucky O'Hare (NES)
106.
Wheel of Fortune (N64)
107.
Resident Evil 2 (PS1)
108.
Dragon Quest VI (SFC)
109.
Ninja Gaiden (NES)
110.
StarTropics (NES)
111.
Parody World: Monster Party (Famicom)
112.
Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
113.
Kamen No Ninja Hanamaru (Famicom)
114.
Power Blade (NES)
115.
Power Blazer (Famicom)
116.
Metroid (NES)
117.
Kid Icarus (NES)
118.
New Super Mario Bros. U (Wii U) *
119.
Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubee no Karakuri Manjigatame (SFC)
120.
Hitman: Blood Money (Xbox 360)
121.
Super Bonk (SNES)
122.
Plok (SNES)
123.
Batman: The Video Game (NES)
124.
Power Blade 2 (NES)
125.
Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (NES)
126.
Phantasy Star (SMS)
127.
Solomon's Key (Famicom)
128.
Solomon's Key 2 (Famicom)
129.
Panel De Pon (SFC)
130.
Ice Climber (Famicom)
131.
True Crime: Streets of LA (PS2)
132.
True Crime: New York City (PS2)
133. Mafia III (PS4)
I picked this game up after hearing it praised a lot on a podcast years back, but I’ve had this game for absolutely ages. I got it so long ago that it’s one of the pile of games I snagged the last time I was in the States, which means I’ve owned this for at least like 6 years now without ever coming close to getting to it XD. However, after trudging through the True Crime games on PS2 recently and really being in the mood for an actually good game in this genre, I finally went through the trouble of hooking up the PS4 so I could play through a game I’d heard so much good about. I ended up doing damn near everything in the game but any of the drag races (I’m so tired of races in games like this <w> ), and it took me about 46 or so hours to beat the English version of the game.
Mafia 3 is the story of Lincoln Clay. Taking place in 1968, Lincoln has just gotten back from a tour serving in the Vietnam war (a tour he volunteered to do rather than being drafted), and he’s returned home to New Bordeaux (a fictional New Orleans-style city in Louisiana). Growing up a minor gangster in his adoptive father’s gang, now that he’s had some time away from home, he’s ready to move out to California and start life over again as soon as he has his homecoming. After helping wrap up some quick gang business for his family, he’s wrapped up into a much larger heist that promises to be the last of their problems for good. However, fate is not so kind to Lincoln. Instead of this being the end of their problems, the big mob boss in town, Sal Marcano, ends up killing them all and taking all of the loot for himself. In a stroke of luck (good or bad, who can say), Lincoln actually survives the massacre and swears revenge on the rotten scumbag who took everything from him. So begins the story of Lincoln Clay’s journey from small-time mobster to ruler of all New Bordeaux’s criminal underworld.
That last bit there is hardly a spoiler either. The framing device the game uses is that of a documentary in the modern day (2016, when this game came out) reflecting on the life of Lincoln Clay and what he did to take over New Bordeaux. It cuts to interviews with Lincoln’s surviving father figure, Father James (a priest living in New Bordeaux who raised Lincoln when he was an orphan) as well as old footage of a senate hearing with the CIA operative who helps Clay with so much of this stuff, John Donavan. They cut back to it relatively frequently before and after major story events, and it’s a really clever framing device that deftly whets your appetite for a lot of what you’re about to do.
All in all, the writing in this game is absolutely fantastic. Lincoln Clay is an incredibly engaging protagonist as a black man in the American south in the 60’s. Dealing not just with white supremacists but also plenty of other minorities that the white establishment does its best to pit against one another, this game makes for a fascinating and enrapturing tale of race, discrimination, and perseverance in the face of injustice. The best part of that is that it’s not shy to mince words about these things either. Lincoln is hardly a perfect person, but the game never tries to make out like nonviolence is the only and best way forward against oppression. There are certainly voices (and well-reasoned ones too) in this game that speak against violence and the impact it can have on cultures, communities, and people, but we thankfully also always have voices speaking to the reality of the situation: That turning the other cheek is nice in spirit, but that the real world doesn’t always work that way, and fighting back against your oppressors is simply necessary in certain situations. It’s a refreshingly prescient view of the world (that has only gotten more and more prescient in the nearly 10 years since this game came out), and it’s also one that was very common to the world of the 1960’s in America.
This is also a story very interested in legacies, both how they’re made and what kind of impact they have on people, and it uses parents and their (usually adult) children to explore this a lot. How you can try to leave the world to your children all you like, but all too often your ability to actually make the world you want to leave to them is simply impossible (for better or for worse). Lincoln Clay is a center of a lot of these themes, but the supporting cast is also so strong too that I don’t feel I’d ever be able to type enough to communicate how solidly it’s all done. The underbosses whose loyalties you need to juggle, the cronies in Marcano’s criminal empire you’ve got to tussle with, and even Sal Marcano himself are all woven into this larger tapestry so skillfully that I’m super psyched to play more from this team (as soon as I can afford to <w> ).
As awesome as the story is, the gameplay only kinda lives up to it. Mafia 3 is by no means a bad GTA-like game (a “guy in a city” game, as I call ‘em), and I had a blast with it basically the whole time, but I can see why people were a little bored with this back when it came out in 2016. As most open world games of last decade had, you’ve got driving, you’ve got gunplay, and you’ve got a stealth system. There are a lot of different types of vehicles to hop in and joy ride around in, and they feel pretty darn good too. There’s a really well executed difference between hot rods that handle like a dream and family cars that handle as well as they have to, and all of the 60’s inspired cars add a ton to help New Bordeaux’s americana come alive too.
The gunplay is also very solid, but the time to kill is very fast compared to a lot of these sorts of games I’ve played. It’s also not just fast for your enemies, but fast for Lincoln too. You’ve thankfully got some quite useful aim assistance features, but not using the cover system to avoid taking shots still means you’re going to get turned to Swiss cheese very fast. I super love stealth games, so sneaking around to take out as many bad guys as possible before I started going loud is my preferred playstyle anyhow, but you’re pretty heavily encouraged to play that was to begin with given just how lethal your enemies are even on normal difficulty.
Another aspect you have to deal with is the police of New Bordeaux. They’re thankfully nowhere near as observant as Empire City’s cops were in Mafia 2 (so you can run red lights all you want without fear of a massive car chase), but civilians will still call the cops if they see you doing something you shouldn’t be. Sal’s organization also has the town’s police in their pocket, too, so if the cops come to bust up a fight between you and the other gangs, you can bet that it’s only you that they’re gonna be taking issue with. Calculating how to best tackle each encounter to both not get minced by your enemies but also not incur the wrath of the NBPD is a fun challenge that I enjoyed a ton, but that’s also basically the formula that all missions take on.
The general gameplay loop is breaking up the rackets that Sal’s gang are running in each district until you can take them over yourself. Doing enough of that will unlock a final story mission (a more linear assault with fun set pieces) to take over the district for keeps to distribute to one of your underbosses. The little bits of running your mafia organization are nice flavor to the experience without feeling like you’re getting bogged down in a management sim game. Even still, most missions and sub-missions still take the same form of sneaking into/assaulting a place to either kill a guy or destroy a thing/vehicle at the end. The game is thankfully, mercifully aware that car combat sucks in these kinds of games, and I didn’t even realize you could fire your gun whilst driving because there’s not even a tutorial for it let alone a concrete or consistent need for it. Even still, if you don’t vibe with the general flow of missions in this game, you’re going to have a pretty plodding time through this game, since there’s not much more here for you than that. I still think it works just fine and is plenty fun as is. I don’t mind that we don’t have the crazy ambitious weird missions GTA tends to have because it also means we avoid the crazy drops in quality the more frustrating of those missions shove you into, and the high strength of the narrative as a whole made the “higher valleys, lower peaks” of the gameplay design a real non-issue for me, but I definitely understand that for a lot of folks, that wasn’t the case for them.
You’ve got all of the massive town of New Bordeaux to explore and do missions in. The scale of the town does a good job with making a town that feels big but not so utterly massive that it feels empty as a result, but it still does err on the side of being a bit too big for its own good. There are so many missions that have you going to and from the bayou in particular that I really wished the game had some kind of minor fast travel system to allow you to go between bus stops or something, because driving those same long distances over and over given how many missions have you going from one side of the city to the other just for the sake of realism in location design. A lot of missions down in the bayou are thankfully optional, so you can just ignore them if you’re that annoyed by it, at least.
The last part of the general gameplay I wanna talk about are the collectibles, because this game honestly has one of the coolest sets of collectibles I’ve ever seen in a game. Most of them are various pieces of memorabilia or americana from the time. You’ve got album covers from famous records, magazine covers, and communist propaganda posters, but the far more important and fun thing are the magazines you find. You’ve got Hot Rod magazines you can find, and much like in Mafia 2, you’ve also got Playboy magazines you can find (there are like 50-something of them from all throughout the 60’s). Most of the latter only have the cover and that month’s saucy center fold for you, but some of them (my favorites) have an interview article included too, and there are so many super cool ones! It goes without saying that the car-focused magazines are just articles, but the interview ones are 10+ page articles, thousands of words interviewing some really major and interesting figures from the 60’s (from major political writers and thinkers to even the Beatles and the leader of the Black Panthers). This was the type of thing that I never expected a game like this to have, and it does so much to add to the context that the game is set in for someone unfamiliar with the time period. It made collecting the Playboys particularly exciting as well as hilarious because it meant that I was really excited to hunt them down but not for the reasons anyone would’ve normally guessed X3
The most major flaw I have with the game regards how it runs. Even with its “Definitive Edition” end of life patches as I play in 2025, there were still a good few bugs in Mafia 3 for me, and I can only imagine that it was even worse back when it first launched (particularly on PC). I thankfully never fell through the world or had some game-breaking experience that lost me a ton of content, but it’s still annoying that these bugs are here. The most common ones for me were the humorous case of cars spawning incorrectly (like a car spawning in the ground or a sedan spawning for my crate pickup instead of a big pickup truck) and the tedious mission toggle break. Both of these cases were thankfully harmless, as the latter just meant that the quest pop ups for initiating things like tailing missions or talking to an NPC to initiate the start of a quest just wouldn’t initiate. It was annoying, but just quitting back to the main menu and reloading in always fixed it, but this game’s load times are also long enough (well over 10 seconds) that it was more annoying than I would’ve liked. That long load time goes for when you die and have to respawn as well. I never died terribly much in this game, but that is just one more penalty for dying that’s even more annoying than it needs to be :/
Annoying as those were, it’s still really disappointing to see stuff of that caliber still a problem this far into the patch cycle of a big game like this (especially with the Definitive Edition re-release), and that sadly affects the presentation too. Despite the PS4 presumably being this game’s main console platform back when it launched in 2016, this game not only has some significant framerate drops when there are a lot of vehicles on screen, but it also just doesn’t look terribly nice either. I’m not really a stickler for graphics, but there were enough times where a minor character model looked weird enough that I had to shake my head and go “Well I guess that never got properly finished, huh?”.
Models for important characters in cutscenes are thankfully fine and animated well, but that’s when there even is animation. There were quite a few cutscenes where it’s just Lincoln and someone else staring at each other talking rather than the scene feeling more natural with deliberate cinematography like the better cutscenes have. I didn’t think anything of it until one particular cutscene where Clay mentioned that the other character was doing something that we were clearly not shown them doing, and that made me realize that a lot of these weird “eye contact only” cutscenes were probably meant to have more animation and such to them, but that stuff just had to get cut for time and never got attended to later.
The biggest and hardest to miss wtf for the graphics are when you’re driving, though. You have a speedometer at the bottom of the screen and a rear-view mirror at the top that shows behind your car. It’s a neat feature, but the scenery in the rear-view mirror also clearly looks *awful* compared to what the main game’s graphics show. The render distance in it is so short that it’s impossible not to see the huge grey wall consuming the world behind you, and that looks even more absurd when you turn the camera around to see that your main game’s render distance is far beyond what the rear-view mirror shows. It’s a really easily ignored problem, and I honestly never found the rear-view mirror terribly useful in the first place, but it’s also such a glaringly ugly yet mechanically unimportant bit of visual design that I question why they even felt the need to include it in the first place. The last note I have about driving and graphics is that this game doesn’t really have much in the way of your car getting deformed or damaged when it takes hits. I imagine that it’s down to just how much visible strain the vehicles put on the hardware when they’re not deforming, but it’s still really weird to see the absence of much meaningful vehicle damage when these sorts of games have been great at showing how messed up your car has been getting even in the early PS2-era.
The presentation as a whole, outside of the weird technical issues and shortcomings, are otherwise really good. New Bordeaux is a really cool place and a really neat reimagining of a town like New Orleans. From the slums down in The Hollow down to the shiny streets of downtown and the French Quarter, they really bring the 60’s to life fantastically. Some human models are certainly under animated in lower priority scenes, but when they do have animation (which is, in fairness, most of the time), it looks great, and all the people still look really good and lack any PS3-era uncanniness that old games can have sometimes. The sound design is great too. Not only is the music really well done (with good original tracks as well as a huge pile of licensed music from the 60’s to listen to on the radio in-game too), but the voice acting is also out of this world. Particularly with Lincoln Clay and John Donavan, these are easily some of my favorite English voicework performances. The script is already great, but the power with which these VAs bring the chemistry and personality between characters to life is outstanding, and it elevates an already great story to something downright unmissable in my eyes.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I absolutely accept that Mafia 3 ain’t perfect and has some issues with repetition in its gameplay loop that I’m sure will bore some a little, I enjoyed the heck out of it. The gameplay is great fun if you enjoy what it’s going for, and I’m absolutely part of the crowd of people who love games that play like this. The story though, above all else, unquestionably deserves all the praise it’s gotten and then some. Hangar 13 are a hell of a studio for being able to put together something this powerful and deftly executed, and even if you’re not the world’s biggest fan of open world GTA-style games, that I’d say it’s worth going through this game to experience it regardless because the story is just that good.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
