Mafia (PC)

[J T]

Mafia was a very successful game when it was released back in 2002. The average critic rating for Mafia is a 9.0 (based on 46 review) and the average user rating is a 9.2 (based on 7,968 votes).

I completely disagree. This is the worst big budget game I have ever played. Mafia represents everything that is wrong with videogames that try to be movies. Let me explain why.

In Mafia, you play the role of Tommy. Tommy's a guy who kind of fell into the wrong crowd and now he's in the mob life and struggling to find his way out. That's the frame story. The game provides this setting in the beginning and then takes you back to 1930 when it all began. Tommy was a taxi driver who just happened to be pulled into a getaway chase by some mafia men while he was on his shift. They rewarded him with money and the offer of future work. Tommy ends up in a scrape and needs some help, so he takes them up on the offer and a new mobster is born. You then play through the story of the rise and fall of Tommy's Mafia career.

It's a pretty typical mafia movie plot. And herein lies the problem. Mafia just wants to be a movie, and for some reason has decided to be a game. Probably because it was an average sounding mobster movie and making it a game would at least add something unique. Only, it's a horrible game that isn't fun because it still wants to be a movie. The cut scenes are nice and the dialogue is ok, but the interactivity doesn't add to anything. In fact, the points where you are playing the game really just kind of get in the way of enjoying the storyline.

They decided that the gameplay did not need to be so much fun as it needed to be realistic: You drive over 40 mph or run red lights, cops come after you. You get shot 2 or 3 times, you're dead. You need to get somewhere, you take the time to drive. You need to cross the bridge at the same time a freigther boat is going, you wait for the bridge to go up and come back down again. UGH!

These things all add realism precisely where you don't want it. The whole slog of everyday life is built into the game as if that were somehow important for either the game or the story, but really it's not important for either so chalk it up to simulation, but only a simulation of things you would never really want to simulate. I spend enough time in traffic in real life, thank you, I don't need to get caught in the middle of a fucking virtual traffic jam. Even during several chase scenes I had to wait for the damn bridges to raise and lower before I could get on with the driving. One time I even parked the car and walked down stairs to refill my drink only to find that the damn bridge was still up by the time I got back to my chair. Why they thought including the most banal and frustratingly tedious aspects of life was important for the design of this game is utterly beyond me.

Really, the vast majority of the time you spend with this game is simply driving about town trying to get from person to person. It reminds me of watching movies made by really bad film makers that never use editing and instead force you to sit through boring scenes of watching cars drive and park and not skipping a single detail of people walking from place to place. Only, in Mafia these scenes last 15-20 minutes each.

And the driving is terrible. Again, it's that attempt at realism. They tried to make cars that accurately control like cars from the 1930s. That means you can't crack above 20 mph going uphill and you usually top out around 50-60 mph on a straightaway. And if you are fortunate enough to have a car that can go 60, then you will find that you can go from 0 to 60 in about 3 minutes. Acceleration is poor. Handling is poor. Shocks are bloody terrible. You fishtail all over if you hit a turn too fast. It's all excrutiatingly realistic, frustrating, and completely unfun. With cars this shitty, Mafia actually manages to rival Mitchell for worst chase scene ever. In fact, it is worse, because you aren't just watching this turtle-paced 5k race, you are unfortunate enough to be in the poor handling driver's seat.

Combat isn't much better. If you're going to punch someone or hit them with a bat, you have to hold down your attack button to build up your strength, then release to hit em with a wallop. However, if you get hit, you have to restart your hitting meter from the beginning. If you're being double teamed by some thugs, expect to never be able to get out a swing unless you run away, charge and run back into the melee. The shooting portions of the game are ok, but there's not much you can do to dodge and every action sequence where you die requires you to repeat it from the beginning and it all gets terribly repetitive and aggravating after a few failures, and since we are going for realism here, you will die. Many times. And as a player, you will come to hate the repetitions.

Mafia most closely resembles Grand Theft Auto III, which was released a year prior to Mafia's release. Mafia's highly detailed (for 2002) graphics look far superior to the dreary blandness of GTA III, but don't mistake Mafia for a GTA clone because it only appears to be a sandbox game. Yes, you can drive any path and you can punch people on the street just like in GTA III, but where GTA lets you run around and explore and do whatever you want, Mafia restricts and drags you around by the nose on linear fetch quests. GTA III also had linear story, but in between quests the world was your oyster. Mafia's city is just THERE. It's not really like you have much to do there and you're always on jobs for the Mafia, so mostly all of the driving around and getting stuck in traffic just feels like it gets in the way of the story. It feels like an open world game, but that's just a sucker punch for what is a completely linear game.

You see, where Mafia goes wrong is that the gameplay adds nothing to the experience of the story nor is it enjoyable. Some games have story tacked on in between the moments of gameplay and they feel a bit disjointed, but you can forgive them because the gameplay is fun enough to keep you interested and the story is interesting enough to work for the next cut scene. Mafia's cut scenes are derivative of Goodfellas, Godfather, Scarface and every other mob movie you have ever seen, but that could be forgiven if it was at all fun to play. I could even forgive it for not being fun if I felt the gameplay added something to the experience of the story (you know, like how Resident Evil controls terribly, but that adds to the tension and helplessness you feel). But instead, the gameplay consists of all of the tedium of everyday life- driving, walking, waiting... waiting... waiting.... driving again. The only way this adds to the story is if the central premise of the story is simply to say that working for the mafia is an exceptionally boring job punctuated by little moments of utterly frustrating and repetitive violence.

I think the reason why this game was so well received was simply because it was 2002 and we were just starting to see how movie-like games could be. This game has high production values with excellent graphics and sound, nice voice acting, and story that is told very much like a movie. I could possibly see being wowed by this in 2002, but even still, there were much better "cinematic" games back then as well. Playing the game now, I'm really confused by all of the positive reviews the game has received. Mafia just does not stand the test of time.

[Curlypaul]

I really couldnt agree more with you. I played this when it was new, didnt reach the end but alwasy thought it was a pretty good game until just now.

Reading through your points; the cars' shitty handling, that damn bridge, the broken hand to hand, 3 hits and your dead etc these were always points of frustration at the time, but I think I was bowled over by the presentation and the realism so they never seemed that big a deal at the time.

I remember there is one mission where you have to take part in track race in a shiny cigar shapped racer and the only way I could win was to cheat (take alt route thru the center of the track and hit enter to replace the car just before you got to the invisible wall at the end) because the handling on that thing was so damn twitchy and the drone cars would just barge you out of the way. IIRC the drones were on a fixed path no matter what happened.

On the plus side though, there were some cool battles that stick in my mind - like when you show up at the funeral of one of the people you killed and get into a gun fight in church, and there was a level where you turn up at some place in the sticks. Its raining and you and your buddies are lined up at the gateway with pump actions mowing everybody else down. Also, it was fun to kill the police in the street as there were a good source of weapons.

[J T]

It was a strange experience playing this game because I found myself rather uncharacteristically angry about the game. I have been thinking about it and trying to figure out why I am actually mad at the game for not being better. It's not really because I feel I wasted my money. I only spend a couple bucks on the game during a Steam sale, so it's no real loss. It's not exactly that I feel I wasted my time with it. I do feel it was a waste of time, but I disliked the game very early on and still felt compelled to play for more time than I play some games that I actually like.

I think what it is that bothers me about the game is just lost potential. Mafia has a really beautifully created 1930s urban setting. It's rare to see a well-realized period piece in videogames. It's actually cool to drive around and see all of the old cars, buildings, and street signs. You feel like you are transported back into another era. However, if you only have the artifacts of the era to interact with, and not the people, then it feels kind of like a trip to a museum without any explanations of what's behind the glass. The city, for all it's size and grandeur, also feels pretty lifeless. I wanted to see it more fully realized.

Another thing I was thinking about was how Mafia compares to Grand Theft Auto III. What was brilliant about GTAIII was not just that it was the first fully realized sandbox game, nor was it that it was a completely antisocial, criminal violencefest that would become a lightning rod for critique against gaming morality. What was great about GTAIII was that it was both of those things at the same time.

The gameplay went fully hand-in-hand with the story in GTAIII. The basic plot is that you are a badass thug who wants to rise up in the criminal underworld. You play the badguy. The gameplay was totally open and with very few rules. Rockstar seems to understand that many of us have a selfish and dark side to our psyche. Sometimes we think about things that we would never act on. We want to run the red light. We want to hit the guy who looked at us the wrong way. We want to take the rich mans car away from him. These are all things we don't do because there are consequences to other and there are consequences to us. GTAIII's sandbox gameplay takes away all the rules and consequences of real life and says "here. Give it a try. Go ahead and push everyone out of your way. Take what you want. Kill anyone that gives you trouble. Stick your middle finger up to the police." It plays into all of our violent fantasies and lets us have them free of charge. It's really a game about the freedom one feels when breaking rules, so the criminal storyline and the sandbox gameplay work exceptionally well together. GTAIII's game design understands why you want to be the bad guy and it makes it as liberating and enjoyable for your as possible.

Mafia's game design just doesn't understand this and I find it irritating. I like the smooth talking gangster approach, but in the end it just makes me want to play a Grand Theft Auto game.

[Hobie-wan]

I never had a desire to play the game in the first place, but that was a great review confirming that I don't want to play it.

[thelolotov]

I never had a desire to play the game in the first place, but that was a great review confirming that I don't want to play it.

My thoughts exactly.

[turbolegs]

I loved this game when it was released!

I completely understand your comments about the cars and your very limited health though. I remember the first few missions up to the hotel raid being absolutely excruciating. Conversely, some of the later missions I feel are fantastic, I especially love the set pieces, even if they are used to thinly veil some dubious combat.

I think part of the reason I enjoyed the game so much was because I went in completely blind, I had heard nothing about it and got it off of a friend for £5. I love cruising through the countryside, having a massive shootout in an airfield, breaking into a manor house, even if a good deal of time was spent searching for health packs...

I guess my affection for this game is mostly nostalgic, but like all good nostalgic games, it has its faults which I actually find quite charming.

[emwearz]

Well said, it's a shitty game and I have not touched Mafia II because of the taste it left in my mouth.

[BoringSupreez]

I never really intended to play Mafia; now, thanks to JT, I don't think I ever will.

[Erik_Twice]

I remember there is one mission where you have to take part in track race in a shiny cigar shapped racer and the only way I could win was to cheat (take alt route thru the center of the track and hit enter to replace the car just before you got to the invisible wall at the end) because the handling on that thing was so damn twitchy and the drone cars would just barge you out of the way. IIRC the drones were on a fixed path no matter what happened.

The car stage was the hardest one in the whole game.

The cars did not follow a fixed path, in fact, I think the easiest way to win is to survive, pushing cars out of the way and waiting for others to crash.

I never found the game frustratingly difficult. I beat it before I had any real FPS skills with a broken hand. No kidding there, I'm being frank.


I liked it. Yeah, the story is generic but pretty well-written, with no corny dialog and no overblown characters. There's a nice sense of progression in the game as time goes by, something that is missing from most games.

It's a step-up from the likes of FF which are both generic and poorly written, as well as practically all other RPGs.


Is it a great game? No, it isn't. And yes, it has dated pertty badly in some regards. But I don't think it's bad, just unspectaculary good.