https://www.cybersport.ru/games/articles/kak-to-dlya-saleri-eto-melko-obzor-mafia-definitive-edition

“Impossible to refuse”

I still remember getting to know the original Mafia: it was evening, I was sitting in the dark, but my face was lit every second by flashes of bright light – those were the shots with which my brother confidently laid out zombies, Nazis and zombie Nazis in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I was scared, and in order not to pretend, I seized fear with chocolate. Suddenly there was a knock on the door: my brother and I shuddered in sync, since we had already forgotten that apart from Wolfenstein’s castle there was also the real world, but we hurried to open it. On the doorstep was the father, who handed us a box with the game.

The box art was very inexpressive – at least for my childish taste: some kind of black and white gangster with two submachine guns. My favorite GTA III had a much cooler cover! However, a novelty is a novelty, so it was decided to pause the conquest of Nazi castles. As it turned out, not in vain! During the bed scene between Tommy and Sarah, my brother, of course, laughed at me: “Your father buys normal things for you,” but as a result of the passage of Mafia it became one of the main games in my life.

Then, for the first time, my brother passed the “Mafia” for me, but since then I myself have reached the final credits at least a dozen times. Speedrun according to Ivan’s precepts Faker I never tried Demkin, but I regularly and with great pleasure returned to the streets of Lost Haven to bring Tommy to that very gallery. In my opinion, the original is still very pleasant to play, but despite this, even I was delighted with the announcement of the remake. Crash Bandicoot, Spyro and other games of my childhood, when switching to modern engines, became very much prettier, and therefore the first trailer for Mafia: Definitive Edition also set me up in a positive way. But my expectations were not met.

“Dust-free work”

Evaluating remakes is not a trivial task. In the industry there is still no definite answer to the question of what the developers of such games need to do in order to gain audience recognition and top marks from the press. To keep everything in its original form or to refresh the title, correct the existing flaws and add those conveniences without which games simply do not exist today?

The example of Resident Evil 2 seemed to show that the second way is preferable – and in the developer diaries Hangar 13 regularly tried to convince everyone that she had chosen this method. Mafia: Definitive Edition has a lot of new things: bikes, stealth mechanics, additional cutscenes and dialogues, a cover system, hand-to-hand combat, quests in walk mode … A whole sea of ​​changes! But everything seems to be done at the last moment on the knee – clumsy and cheap, only to be.

Take, for example, motorcycles – they really are in Lost Haven, but you will have to ride them only once as part of the campaign. For Grand Theft Auto (or at least Mafia III), this would not be a problem – there are enough lessons to do without a plot, but Mafia: DE has retained the original formula in which Tommy will be forcibly thrown from mission to mission, carefully supplying others, completely not a motorcycle transport, which is also much more pleasant to drive. So it turns out that the feature in the game appeared only to show how much Mafia supposedly changed.

Other gameplay innovations make a similar impression. For example, during police chases in Lost Haven, “breakout points” appear – usually cluttered construction sites. Tommy, at the behest of the script, easily passes through them, but opponents with one hundred percent probability get stuck there, crashing into obstacles.

Why this is needed is easy to understand – in the original Mafia, such chases sometimes lasted too long, and the “break points” had to fix it. But in the new game it turned out to be completely redundant, because even at the “classic” level of difficulty, the police are often simply not able to catch up with you. But the cinematics themselves with Tommy’s passage through the impromptu barricades look very bad, and if you and your pursuers are not too fast, it’s also comical, because in this case the opponents manage to crash even at snail’s speed.

Hand-to-hand combat deserves special attention, which the developers managed to spoil – and this despite the fact that the original mechanics of stars from the sky were completely missing. By pressing the Q key, Tommy is able to carry out exactly the same bundles of three blows, exhausting the enemy and preparing him for finishing off, and most often all battles end with ordinary invocation of opponents (who strive to fall into the texture). You get tired of such monotonous fights in the usual mode very quickly, and on the “classic” difficulty they turn into an absolute farce: in a mission with Sarah’s escort, the main hooligan is able to calmly absorb a couple of dozen punches to the face. I can assure you that it was the most boring fight in history.

Shooting in Mafia: DE is still more pleasant, although the mechanics from the third part have migrated into the game. Because of this, instead of the standard crosshair in the center of the screen, Tommy has a huge circle that makes long-range gunfights completely pointless. In comparison with the original, this radically changes the gameplay: now you will not be able to shoot everyone from afar – you will have to get closer and use an updated system of shelters.

The cover system (coupled with exploding barrels, which the developers have placed absolutely everywhere for the sake of entertainment) was the main cause for me to worry, since this is a serious attempt on the gameplay foundations of The City of Lost Heaven. But at the end of the passage, I have to admit that the shooting in the first Mafia was specific, and therefore bringing it to some understandable modern standards is a logical step and, rather, an upgrade, but only in comparison with the 2002 game.

“Bon Appetite”

The key question here is, can these disadvantages spoil the Mafia legacy? Of course not! This is still the same Tommy Angelo crime drama that began the glorious history of this franchise. The original Mafia was incredibly cinematic – the way game designers skillfully worked with the camera and created a real gangster movie with the help of modest (at that time) game tools, simply cannot but impress. And it is this aspect of the original Definitive Edition that has been preserved.

But I do not think that games today can be evaluated in a spherical vacuum – they, like any contemporary art, exist in the context of time and therefore should be considered with adjustments to the realities of the industry. And if then, in 2002, the original Mafia was in many ways revolutionary – due to skillful cinematics, interesting gameplay features and just a high-quality plot – today it looks very naive in places.

At the same time, the developers purposefully built the marketing campaign of the title in such a way that no one would have any doubts: the new Mafia is an actual Mafia, created in the same format as the remake of Resident Evil 2, which fought for all the key awards a year earlier. But Hangar 13 failed to do the same as Capcom did. The Definitive Edition is an outdated game that is also very awkwardly trying to rejuvenate.

Now the game is in a very strange position. On the one hand, the developers changed too much in the original formula for hardcore fans of the Definitive Edition to defend the game with a single wall: cover-rolls from the “three” replaced the classic shooting, Paulie became a comical alcoholic-loser, and Salieri suddenly decided to trade drugs … But on the other hand, Hangar 13 did not dare to make more important changes, and that is why Mafia has problems with the pace of the narrative and the motivation of key characters, torn storytelling, a completely empty city with faceless NPCs and a disgusting combat system – even if the latter did not come from The City of Lost Heaven.

“Decadence”

Mafia: Definitive Edition is not a bad game, which, unfortunately, is not able to stand on a par with the best remakes of recent years. Hangar 13 has to be commended for its daring, as it took on a very ambitious task: to take a game from 18 years ago and bring it to modern standards. But the studio completely failed to cope with this, and therefore I find it difficult to understand who in this case is the target audience of the product.

Hardcore fans of the first part probably still keep The City of Lost Heaven somewhere in the bins of their hard drives and do not experience any mental agony, seeing Tommy Angelo’s angular cheekbones and Don Salieri’s low-poly gray hair. For them, the updated graphics will hardly be able to justify attempts on the gameplay (new shooting, a system of shelters and barrels, barrels, barrels) and the plot (in one of the missions you have an absurd pursuit of an airplane across the city).

And the newcomers of the series after the Definitive Edition will hardly be able to understand why everyone loves the original so much: after all, behind the shiny wrapper with motorcycles and the fashionable (no) “combat” from the third part is still the same outdated Mafia. And a couple of action scenes imported into the plot from somewhere in the Hollywood action movies will not fix this situation. Almost every episode in the game could have been staged better.

At the same time, if we abstract from the cult status of the original, Hangar 13 has released a good action game that can captivate fans of crime drama for a couple of nights. For me, this game has always been one of the symbols of the industry – and even I gladly went through the first ten missions in the remake. But, unfortunately, then I still realized that now that I lost the opportunity to justify all the shortcomings of the game by her age, it became very difficult to take her seriously.