Mafia III

The Mafia series never seemed to be able to catch the big break it seemed due for. Despite winning over critics and a small but jealously protective cult audience over the course of two titles - Mafia in 2000 and a loose sequel Mafia II in 2010 - development was never simple, with runaway feature creep, unreliable tech foundations, and a cumulative ten years of delay spent working on just these two games (a staggering amount of time nowadays, in the time of the two-year AAA development cycle) all resulted in games that, while certainly being impressive, especially on the technical side, never lived up to their Icarus ambitions. Six years on past Mafia II's release and with the freshly formed supergroup studio Hangar 13 at the wheel, Mafia III is able to coast over the potholes created by a foundation of rote mechanics into the sunset on the rock-solid tires of its narrative.

One of the biggest strengths of the Mafia series is immersion, which is not something you see developers really push for in large open-world titles. Minute daily tasks like actually working on your car yourself in Mad Max or cleaning your weapons in Far Cry are generally not part of the simulation boundaries, for better or for worse, but Mafia games bucked that trend by focusing (frequently to the detriment of larger narrative and gameplay elements) on the tiny details that really ground you in their worlds. Your character in Mafia II is not some legendary mercenary or chosen warrior - he's just a guy. A guy who likes to eat food, buy clothes, answer the phone and have long unskippable conversations, put gas in his car, and say "fuck" over two hundred times by the end of story. He can't really regenerate his health or take much damage before buying the farm so you kind of have to be careful, he can't run very fast, and he gets pulled over by the cops and given bullshit tickets just like anyone else. And that's great! Participating in all of those small chores and getting to know his limitations was a huge part of selling the idea of this protagonist Vito as being an actual person in this world, and having rules about how the game world worked made it seem like a real, actual place that at least kind of made sense sometimes.

Mafia III wisely continues (mostly) in this vein and Hangar 13 clearly wanted you to feel like protagonist Lincoln wasn't just some blank-faced killing machine: police react to you (slightly) differently depending on what area of the city - a fictionalized portmanteau of New Orleans known as New Bordeaux - you're currently in, and will respond to calls in low-income and minority neighborhoods slower than to disturbances in the more gentrified areas. People on the street will say hello to you and in what is probably my favorite detail in the whole game, Lincoln will actually answer them. He'll beat his hands on the dash if you tune the radio to a song he likes, he has real relationship history with characters you encounter and doesn't get along with all of them, and is aggressively pursued by police in a way that other NPCs aren't, which ties into the game's supposed preoccupation with institutionalized racism. Like Vito before him, Lincoln actually feels like a real person, mostly.  The almost simulation-ist details from Mafia II - the restaurants, clothing stores, gas stations, etc., are brought back in form only, denying you any opportunity to take a breather from your long, long list of dudes to kill to grab a bite to eat, buy some new threads, or really just exist in the world of New Bourdeaux as a person. Shops and diners now exist only as containers for collectibles or as free stops to grab a quick health pack from before driving to your next mission, which... kind of accomplishes the same thing, just in a less interactive way.

Interaction in the greater open world has been replaced with a much bigger emphasis on actual meat-and-potatoes gameplay, which revolves around taking down the criminal rackets of each district of the city. 10 districts, 2 rackets per district, ranging from extortion and bribery to construction fraud and organized auto theft. The unique nature of each racket is tempered by the similarity of the objectives you'll complete to trash them: interrogate some guys, slaughter a couple of small groups of guys (usually guarding something emblematic of that racket, like a warehouse full of stolen cars or a brothel) and destroy some stuff, and keep doing it until you trigger the racket's "stronghold" mission, which involves infiltrating a building and killing all the bad guys inside it, like a railyard used to stash guns.The high quality of the animations and the general beefiness of the combat coupled with the sandbox nature of the encounters allows for a bit of emergent gameplay to emerge, but it's unfortunately much too simple too cruise up and indiscriminately ventilate most of these guys without having to put much thought into it. Even on the highest difficulty enemies exhibit some pretty generous nearsightedness at odds with their Terminator-like aiming abilities, making it way too easy to get the drop on them, especially considering Lincoln isn't exactly built for stealth with his jeans and Army jacket getup.

Your willingness to experiment with the tools Mafia III provides will be a big part of whether you joyfully proceed through the districts or trudge with heavy feet. There's a large selection of handguns, shotguns, and rifles to play with as well as some upper-tier special weapons not available until you finish around 2/3s of the game, but the lack of variety in the enemy types coupled with the limited ammo capacity you begin with encourage brutal efficiency over playfulness. It took me about 30 hours to complete the game and for the last 10 of those the remaining objectives felt like a tax I had to pay to make it to the next cutscene. Maybe I'm just burned out on open world games at this point after spending so much time with Mad Max but the prospect of replaying Mafia III right now only seems enticing to see how the story turns out after favoring other characters.

Like previous games in the series Mafia III lives and dies by it's narrative, and thankfully the one presented here is an absolutely magnetic period piece. The game begins with a lengthy tutorial segment that pulls double duty as the setup for rest of the plot, introducing you to major players like Sal Marcano (the game's antagonist), his son Giorgi, and Lincoln's surrogate family in Sammy and Ellis Robinson, de facto leaders of a small blue collar district known as The Hollow. You're introduced to the game's mechanics at the same as the story is ramping up into the inciting incident that informs the rest of the game, and it's easily the best part of the game next to the last hour. The writing has an honest, intimate quality to it that lends the characters a true-to-life quality that makes them endlessly watchable (and since this is 1968 pretty much everyone is either drinking or smoking 100% of the time). There are no twists. There are no surprise betrayals. There is no bullshit. We the players simply propel Lincoln Clay along his course as he channels Anton Chigurh and delivers cold, systematic death to Sal Marcano's operations. It would be a lie to say it isn't gripping as hell to watch, or cathartic. The extended length of time spent coming to grips with Sammy and Ellis make their deaths at least slightly more impactful than usual and the weirdly few real, actual cutscenes are very well done, it's just disappointing when get about 6 hours into it and realize that, well... this is it.

An open, lifeless world. Hilariously repetitive missions and gameplay, coupled with some of the most inoffensive, boring AI I've experienced since Far Cry 3. Playboy collectibles in a game "about" racism in the Deep South in 1968 (really). Side missions seemingly designed to elicit religious levels of boredom and a distinct scent of "not finished" hanging over the entire experience. Any yet, a simple narrative that clearly had so much work put into it, and is surprisingly affecting at times, occasionally dragging itself out of a pit of genre conventions and cliches to stand on its own as a real piece of art. Mafia III is a lot of things to a lot people and I don't regret the time I spent with it, but God damn if it bums me out seeing the potential they had with this.

Edit on racism: This is probably the biggest disappointment with Mafia III as it is a game "about" racism as much as Bioshock is a game "about" Objectivism. As a combat trained Special Forces vet with access to basically unlimited money and transportation (while being somehow immune to traffic laws), Lincoln is elevated above the mundane institutionalized bigotry that people in real life and even other characters in the game experience. It's hard to feel persecuted by a random NPC's snide comment when you can just blow his head off and immediately call off the cops for a nominal fee, and it's hard to instill a sense of vulnerability or world-weariness when the actual game seems so afraid of actually impacting your experience. Taken more charitably, you could say that the developers worked to minimize the impacts racism would have on the minute-to-minute gameplay in order to anesthetize you to its presence and consider it as just another aspect of the world, like the architecture or people's accents. And while that is an interesting target to shoot for, Mafia III suffers more than any game I've played in a long, long time from being made in our age of "gameplay and story" should be separate. Just makes you imagine how it would've turned out if someone like Clint Hocking had been leading Mafia III's development instead.