Mafia 3 Review

Pros:

• Extremely story heavy
• Satisfying combat
• Decent stealth system
• Actions have consequences
• Upgrade system
• Music

Cons

• Game crashes fairly often (PC)
• Cops are overpowered

Mafia 3’s main focus appears to be on the storyline and the progression of the characters involved. This is fairly unique (and refreshing) as most games lately are more focused on everything else and the story ends up as more of an afterthought. I don’t want to spoil anything so in a nutshell the story took me 32 hours to complete and there are multiple different endings based upon your choices. On top of that there is an additional scene at the end of the credits following the game. Finally my favorite thing about their story is how they decided to tell it. Rather than follow what most games do, Mafia 3 will periodically switch to an interview with a few of the people involved in the story (interviews taking place years later).

The combat involved in Mafia 3, while nothing new, is satisfying and the takedowns are often brutal. The stealth system is quite basic and deals mostly with direct line of sight combining this with the cover system and you can get through otherwise difficult situations with relative ease. That being said, the combat and stealth while both competent do not bring anything new to the table that we have not already seen in other games.

One of the best parts of Mafia 3 is that your actions actually have consequences, what I mean by this is that when you give areas to the people that work for you the others will resent that and if you consistently don’t give anything to them they will turn on you. At the same time, however if you constantly give the same person more and more they will like you more and more. All of these factor into what kind of upgrades that you can get and how the story ends. As far as the upgrades go, whenever you take a part of the city and give it to one of your men to run, they will give you something, whether it be a new gun or a car upgrade you will then have to choose between your men to see what you want most, or who you like most.

As far as the good things this game has to offer the last thing that I wanted to mention is the music. There is a lot of good music in Mafia 3 all of which from the time period, including artists such as Elvis Presley and The Rolling Stones. The music most definitely added to the game experience, and helps a lot with the in game immersion.

While Mafia 3 certainly has good things there are still (as always) issues with it. My biggest issue with it is that it crashes often. I play on PC so it may just be due to a bad port, but my game would completely crash once or twice every few hours and for no apparent reason. Luckily the game’s auto save system works just fine so it wasn’t that long before I was back in the game. My other gripe with Mafia 3 is that the cops are way to overpowered. For example when you are attacking anyone other than cops, in order for them to call in backup they have to yell or run over to a phone and call backup, however if you come up behind a cop who is alone and sneakily kill him, somehow backup gets called and they are pulling up in cars before you can get back in your car and drive away. On top of that they will have a seemingly endless amount of reinforcements coming from every direction. If that wasn’t enough all of the mobsters that you fight have the cops in their pocket so if you ever get in a fight where both the mafia and the cops are both there you will be fighting both of them.