The blackest mafia

Mafia 3 review

The title literally broke into two critics and audience among those who managed to appreciate it despite everything also and above all thanks to the story told and those who could not digest that a sequel could distance itself so much to the mechanics and style of writing from the original title.

Both titles, however, were destined to suffer the same evil: sales below expectations in the face of a long and troubled development. Also of Mafia III has been said a lot in the past. A game several times ended up among the rumors because of alleged leaks and that for years has been, apparently, in development in the offices of the original team: the Illusion Softworks guys then merged into 2K Czech following the closure of the software house.

And so if on the one hand we tried to follow the tradition of the series by implementing the usual change of protagonist, city and time period, on the other we also tried to tackle the tortuous and dangerous road of the total modification of the gameplay that in the occasion of this third chapter turns completely towards open world free roaming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMP6INLa4EM

Why we say it right away: pc mafia 3 is in all respects a Grand Theft Auto (plus IV and V) set in the late 60s in a fictitious city, New Bordeaux, strongly inspired by the famous Louisiana city, New Orleans.

But be careful to let go of the prejudices on the basis of this powerful and heavy comparison: the new work of Hangar 13 is a pleasant game and, after all, also original for some design choices and its defects, which we will address during the review, not derive (or at least not only) from his contemptuous desire to approach the masterpiece of Rockstar.

Mafia III is an excellent game in narrative terms, but it’s a shame that it suffers on the front of the gameplay

Mafia 3 game story

Lincoln Clay is our avatar. A big black guy with Italian origins, Vietnam’s veteran, where he was noted for some exemplary gestures of war that allowed him to earn even a few medals. Orphan in his youth, he spent his teenage years poised on that thin border between legality and lawlessness typical of those who have very little to lose and must build friendships and family on the road. Adopted soon by the black mafia,

Lincoln will be found, once back in his city, to take part in events much bigger than him and in the moment marked by a gunshot, to lose all his affections at the hands of the ruthless boss of the Italian mafia of New Bordeaux, Salvatore “Sal” Marcano.

After a long stay spent with the loving care of the parish priest James Ballard and under the supervision of the CIA agent John Donovan, Clay is ready to perform a violent and bloody revenge with the aim of dismantling the criminal operation of the Marcos and killing his family head.

The narrative component is, without a shadow of a doubt, the most successful part of mafia 3 the game thanks to filmmaking and precise choices of storytelling that are based on truth cinema and the most modern documentaries.

The story is in fact told as a sort of great flashback where the sequences of gameplay are interspersed with interviews and statements of the protagonists collected years away from the facts. The result is really interesting and manages to keep the player’s attention up to the epilogue, which comes after about twenty hours, using very high quality cutscene.

The first stages of the game in particular stand out for the perfect interlocking of all the mechanisms involved. mafia 3 gameplay starts as a long tutorial where the open world component is in the background: there is never actually offered to the player who instead simply follow the prologue thanks to a plot that goes hand in hand with the gameplay discovering characters, controls, game features and so on.