Dated, repetitive missions and technical troubles sour a slick setting and story.

http://i.imgur.com/iG6YVUX.jpg

GAME DETAILS

Developer: Hangar 13
Publisher: 2K Games
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One (PC and PS4 reviewed)
Rating: M for Mature
Release Date: October 7, 2016
Price: £40 / $60
Links: Amazon (UK) | Amazon (US) |Official website

Mafia 3's first few hours are some of the best you'll play this year—but the next few dozen are among the most disappointing.
17
Following on from the well written but mechanically limited Mafia 2, developer Hangar 13 has used this opportunity—in which is incidentally its debut game—to shift the series' perspective entirely, with mixed results. So rather than fixating on the made men of the '40s and '50s, Mafia 3 moves to the late '60s, and the heavily stylised city of New Bordeaux. The '60s were a vibrant, culturally rich time and Mafia 3 captures the southern American soul of a Louisiana-inspired city fantastically well. From its big American cars—with their wide girth, chrome bumpers, and enormous steering wheels—to Hendrix riffs and the high-pitched tones of the Rolling Stones, Mafia 3 is an accomplished exercise in period world-building.

The city is rich and varied, with lovely details and intricate little flourishes bringing the entire place to life, despite a handful of technical failings (more on that later). The newfound focus on the African-American mob takes a mature and considered approach to the oppressive attitudes of the times, too. It's unflinching and often unpleasant, but the depiction of racism is sensitively handled, without ever feeling gratuitous.

You play as Lincoln Clay—a young, biracial orphan fitting an interesting Henry Hill archetype that embodies loyalty and decency, despite a penchant for everything criminal. Having recently returned to New Bordeaux after a stint in Vietnam as a special forces soldier, Lincoln hits the streets to help out his surrogate father, Sammy, who's also the leader of the local black crime organisation.

The game begins with a well paced and patient story setup, which has Lincoln robbing the federal reserve with the son of Mafia kingpin, Sal Marcano. It's a great heist that kicks the game off with a bang, and it leads to Marcano asking Lincoln to take over from Sammy, claiming he's got too old for the life. Rather than betray his father figure, Lincoln refuses, instead promising to continue doing good work to help repay a debt that Sammy owes. Cue a fabulously directed and violent double-cross, which leaves Sammy and his closest associates murdered, their headquarters destroyed, and Lincoln presumed dead after taking a bullet to the side of the skull.

These opening hours are really well crafted, with lavish cutscenes that bring out the game's fantastic script, great voice-acting and superbly detailed facial animations. From the subtle movements of a character's brow, to the way their tongue actually moves in a natural way, Mafia 3 has some of the most convincing facial capture in the business, and it goes a long way to selling its story as real and authentic.


http://i.imgur.com/gy9y31f.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IxqrUlP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/9hqsyE8.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uqdiaHe.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/5XlLmWt.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/joccqMW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/R4vVt14.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/s4Z7PeB.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/wCJOjid.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/I4FLNlG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Y0dsZH9.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/6qEj4Cr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hDu4WPj.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KhNVm9R.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ylhE7p1.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/obvIKWX.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/GFZ0L5J.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/1Lu55sz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UEzntYW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uERtdui.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/IdUVPRt.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/kSZANQS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/CpxY1CR.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/TG3vvYL.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/wmVWCH6.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/7KTdHcC.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ltEuSd0.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ixLkqLg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/x1Fu0m6.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SN6fdmg.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/0h0oX09.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/bifOkK6.jpg


Great too are the documentary-style cuttings that flash forward to a future investigation into Lincoln's actions in 1968, and they allow the story to play with chronology for an interesting perspective on events, signposting key plot points before they happen, while raising the tension as they do. It's smart and intriguing, and the writing never takes a dip. In fact, it's in these cut scenes that Mafia 3 hits its heights, tackling mature themes from murder to rape without appearing crass or immature.

Sadly, this intro and the story it sets up are the pinnacle of Mafia 3's experiences. After the double-cross, the game opens up and lets you roam free in its open world, but rather than continue as a compelling story-driven adventure it becomes a rote third-person shooter that relies on a litany of repetitive tasks. Much like the first Assassin's Creed, it's a game with so much promise that collapses under the weight of its own ambition.

Its core mechanic wants Lincoln to overtake the rackets that are littered across the multiple districts of New Bordeaux, in an effort to shut down Marcano's empire from the bottom up. With every low-level mob leader you kill, each supply stash you rob, and every shipment of contraband you destroy, you do financial damage to the Mafia's organisation. Each district of the city varies in the kinds of crime it hosts—some feature drug dealers, some have pimps, and others are home to arms smugglers—but the missions themselves remain the same. You're either killing goons, destroying stashes, or robbing money, but every single thing you do in Mafia 3 is built around bringing these arbitrary sums of money down to zero.

And so you shoot, sneak, and drive your way around countless different locations across New Bordeaux. The city thrives on its rich colour, from the skyscrapers of Downtown in the centre of the map, to the swampy heat-haze of the Bayou in the south. Head north and you find the whiter, richer areas of the city which have a prim and proper suburban feel, with trees lining avenues and large mansions with their own land. The game also smartly implements racial commentary into its wanted system. Commit crimes in a place like this—where the population is mostly white—and the cops will turn up almost immediately and in great numbers. It's not the same story if you start brandishing your shotgun in the black districts to the south, where you'll hear the police responder say things like "if you can be bothered, go take a look."

The problem is that the mission scenarios themselves aren't particularly organic. It's all very artificial; there's none of the curated open-world structure that the likes of Grand Theft Auto V and Metal Gear Solid V do so well. Rather than taking the time to craft individual missions that play on game's strengths—its story, its characters, and its writing—Mafia 3 is instead content to get you to take on the same four or five objectives again and again.

https://youtu.be/a1bjl9wM-og

It sounds ridiculous, but these objectives can often take seconds to complete. Around 15 hours into the game, when I was truly beginning to feel the tedium, I found ways which let me grab a great view of my targets and headshot them from afar. The objective would be complete within about 10 seconds—it's dull and archaic.

Once you've completed any number of different racket missions, you draw out the leader for that particular district. What's next is the same every time—you pay them a visit, shoot their guys, and then kill them with the same cutscene every time. The only thing that makes these identical tasks satisfying is that, once you've killed the district's leader, you take that district for yourself and hand it over to one of your three underbosses.

There's Cassandra, the leader of the Haitian Mob; Burke, the Irish boss; and Vito Scaletta, the protagonist from Mafia 2, who makes a welcome return as an on-the-run ex-Mafia top dog. These three characters are your go-to associates and form some of the game's best moments, but they're sadly few and far between. When they did show up, the game brought me back into its brilliant cutscenes, and I found myself thinking "yes! This is where the game finally gets good"—but it happened so infrequently that I couldn't find a substantial-enough narrative thread to make me want to carry on.

Thank heavens that the mechanical underpinnings that hold the game together are strong, at least. Guns feel punchy and there's a wonderful satisfaction in pulling off headshots, with blood splatter that feels suitably Scarface; the walls, floors, and ceilings get coated in crimson throughout each gunfight. Car chases can be great, too, at least when the police aren't buggy and broken, with vehicles handling with heft and weight, drifting around corners with more booty than Blackbeard. The odd sports car you find feels like a real treasure, and there's a huge amount of enjoyment to be found in just cruising around the city's various districts to see the sights.

But then you're back to doing the same stuff again. There are a couple of high points, when the game ditches its cookie-cutter objectives and gives you instead a great set-piece to play through. One is a horror-like shoot-out in an abandoned funfair that's been overtaken by awful hillbilly white supremacists. Another is a Hollywood-like scrapyard battle where you're perched above a ton of wrecked cars using a sniper rifle to defend against an onslaught of Mafia henchmen. There's also a really great car chase with Vito, but it's a little let down by some poor AI problems. They're little glimpses of the potential that Mafia 3 had, but they make it all the more saddening to go back to doing the same old stuff once you've completed them.


http://i.imgur.com/yJiUPPb.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/B7lCDe3.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/GBaPZ1q.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/4ltGLyC.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/O1ZHDOq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/BUOiAKQ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/lmR5m0C.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/8Dyz8EU.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/YMvVcqz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KcgJ2Kx.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uDauKyS.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/dUFdErA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KoW7SHA.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/VZsvSMP.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/6z6UZBz.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/jLPMWyW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/KEny9Vr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/NojmSwJ.jpg


And that's where Mafia 3's structural design problems end, and its technical ones begin. New Bordeaux is a wonderful place to wander, but its graphical issues have no end. Playing on my fairly powerful i5 4670K with 8GB RAM and a hefty GTX 1070, Mafia 3 looks like complete bum in places. The night time sections look great, with some lovely ambient lighting, but by day the entire game is coated in a muddy haze that looks like a bad Instagram filter. The sky boxes look like something from a PlayStation 1, the draw distance is shoddy, and the pop-in sometimes throws oncoming traffic into your face about three metres in front of you.

Worst of all, the game seems to be rendered at a far lower resolution than I was setting it to, looking like a 720p game blown up to 1440p. It's a bizarre mix of occasionally good looks contrasted with some supremely bad ones, and it tops off an already lacklustre game.

I wanted Mafia 3 to be brilliant. I loved its predecessor and I was hugely excited for the concept of this new, more edgy period of history. I also believed that Hangar 13 could bring it to life. In the end, though, it brings only some of it to life, laying the foundations of a great story, establishing the personality of some fantastic characters, and showing what a really well written script brings to a game. Unfortunately, it lacks the ideas and the substance to justify its lengthy runtime, and there's not nearly enough content to warrant such a vast open world. For a game with this much potential to be so unimaginative—that's criminal.

The Good

Fantastic voice acting, superb cutscenes, and some great writing bring the city of New Bordeaux to life
Solid gunplay and driving form the foundations upon which a great game could be built
The Bad

Doesn’t bother to build on these foundations at all, with structurally derivative, unimaginative, and hugely dated missions from start to finish
Endless, almost laughable repetition that becomes so tedious that you get bored of playing after just a few hours
A whole host of technical problems on both PlayStation 4 and PC—the latter of which doesn’t perform nearly as well as it should even on powerful hardware
The Ugly

God damn those awful sky boxes
Verdict

Mafia 3 is a classic case of style over substance, where its slick setting and story can't make up for tired open-world gameplay. What a disappointment.

Sam White is a writer, journalist, and regular contributor to the likes of The Guardian, The Telegraph, and GQ. He passionately believes he has a claim to at least one duchy—which is by disputed by genealogists everywhere. Find him on Twitter at @Samwrite.