re: Mafia: The Old Country gameplay trailer

Finished the game in about 12 hours. It took me about the same length of time to finish Mafia 2.

I enjoyed the story more than Mafia DE. Enzo, like the main character of Mafia 1 (whose name I can't even remember), is very much a blank slate with no personality other than he is a "good guy." He has no real arc.

I think they've got the right idea with this game, but 2K needs to hand this franchise off to a more competent developer in order for it to truly shine. There is a distinctive "double A" amateurish feeling this game has that neither Mafia 3 nor DE had. Likely the layoffs that the studio has suffered has left the them with a lot of inexperienced devs who cost less. This is also likely why they switched to UE5. They've had three games to get the shooting right, and they can't seem to figure out how to design competent shooting mechanics for this third person shooter. Your character aims like he's drunk until you get the idol that shortens the time needed to fire accurately and even then it isn't great.

There really isn't enough mission variety. Maybe they were hamstrung by the time period, but cars/horses are "mostly" a nonfactor and are just a means of traveling in between the various shooting galleries. Almost every mission is "sneak into a place then shoot your way out of it." There is some forced stealth but not a terrible amount.

Lastly, I don't know if this is a UE5 thing related to performance or what, but the open world is completely dead. I don't necessarily mean a lack of activities (for which that is really par for the course with the is franchise), but the open world map is completely empty of other NPCs, vehicles, or horses, exception for when the story calls for it in which case they creepily spawn out of thin air. The map itself then is boring to drive though. As mentioned before, you are pretty much the only character roaming around the map, and buildings are largely replaced by grass, trees, and mountains. NPCs, when they do appear are locked into specific animations and it is impossible to interact with them. walk next to them and there's an impenetrable forcefield which prevents you from bumping into them. There are a couple "cities" dotted around the map that are roughly as large as a city in RDR1.

The game is also a technical mess from an optimization standpoint. Literally anywhere from 55-100 FPS at max settings (DLSS quality mode) with a 4090 and a Ryzen 9 7950X3D. I would say that the game looks nice visually, but at no point does the game look good enough to justify that kind of performance hit, and at points, the game can even look quite flat.

This one was dragged out a bit too much at the end. It got a bit repetitive here and there for such a simple story but it’s worth a play through.