I'm nearly twenty hours into this thing so I figure now is a good time to take a minute to write down some of my thoughts. Coming off of Mad Max, maybe the most well-optimized game I've ever played, Mafia III hasn't exactly knocked my socks off and everyone and their dog was putting the developers on blast for releasing a game that manages to run distinctly less-well than you'd think a game of this graphical caliber would. I'm not going to get into all that stuff here but suffice it to say that it ran decidedly poorly on my system initially, and after the patch it runs... better. Not Mad Max level smoothness but a definite improvement, so performance-wise at least things are alright.
The real meat and potatoes of this game is the story, and so far I've been impressed by the writing. The first hour of the game in particular is a really, really effective tutorial/plot hook setup and the way the story is being told in the past-tense through a kind of documentary and archival footage has kept me interested so far. Open world games tend to be terrible at this kind of thing with all of their faceless quest-dispensers but it's obvious that the developers tried to give these secondary characters at least a modicum of life, and it's very much appreciated since the main thrust of the narrative is pretty straight-ahead: revenge. Combined with juggling the loyalties of your capos (which I thought was introduced a little late actually) and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.
The gameplay at its base level is pretty repetitive, as every district I've tackled so far has followed a similar template of progression: talk to an NPC, get some objectives that pretty much always involve killing dudes in certain locations, interrogate a certain enemy to reveal a bigger objective in the area and take it down to flush out one of the district mini-bosses. You do this twice for each district before taking down the leader of that district in a special, unique mission that have so far been pretty good. This type of stuff can really get old if you aren't someone who likes "making your own fun" and messing around with the sandbox of the game world, so buyer beware. As someone who spent hours fucking around with the outposts in Far Cry games I'm naturally predisposed towards enjoying this kind of stuff and the raw game feel of the gunplay and cover system go a long way towards keeping things from turning too stale as they're pretty great. The AI is mostly pretty blind but on the highest difficulty you're easy enough to kill that there's at least some tension in combat. Oh, and the soundtrack is incredible - lots of great period music and some almost Red Dead Redemption level soundtrack material, but the main menu sells Mafia III hard: a sunset over the bayou as Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" blasts out at you. So far, so good.
Edit: Literally 10 minutes after starting the game up for the first time after writing this I get a watch a great cutscene ruined by one of the character's eyeballs being apparently replaced with giant black shark eyes. Then I got trapped in an infinite loading screen. Nice.
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