Until now, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the “Mafia” series, since I always thought it was nothing but a Grand Theft Auto rip off. But after seeing the Mafia III trailer, I was excited to give it a shot and it certainly did not disappoint. Mafia III is a crime-drama role playing game which takes place in a city called New Bordeaux, which is a re-imagined city of New Orleans in 1968. With a vast open world to explore, the city is made up of 10 districts and each district has its own perks and your mission is to get rid of all the crime lords and take control of their empire.
The graphics are great, and the gameplay is immersive with a great storyline bundled with multiple storyline paths which depends directly on your decisions as you try to rule the city with your underbosses. You control the main character - Lincoln Clay, and you have three underbosses - Cassandra, Bruke and Vito Scaletta. Each underboss has their own strengths and weaknesses. The game can be quite brutal at times, much like GTA as it is full of blood, sex, destruction and foul language so this game is definitely for adults only! The overall gameplay is really fun, but the artificial intelligence of the enemies feel kind of dumb especially when you are on a mission, sneaking in quietly. I mean there was a location owned by Oscar Sabato and the place was surrounded by enemies, but it was really easy to sneak past them simply by hunching a bit and walking, it felt a bit dumb. But that was just a trade off for a great gameplay, animations, especially the hand to hand combat, awesome cutscenes and the engaging storyline which makes this game great! Yes, the storyline holds most of the muscle in this game, but the gameplay is fun too! It takes a simplistic approach to it and the controls are easy to grasp. And one good thing is that there is no “fixed” rule on how you can complete a mission, you can either go in guns blazing, call reinforcements or take the stealth approach alone. Personally, I love the stealth approach since it takes a little bit of planning instead of brute force. However, if you go in guns blazing, you can always call in reinforcements from your underboss to take out most of the enemies as you go for the main target. But if you take the direct approach and you get killed during a mission, you will lose all your items and this can get really frustrating. You can always purchase more weapons and ammo by calling the arms dealer from anywhere. When you make the call, a bright orange van appears and you just have to walk up to it and buy whatever you need. The camera movement in this game is really fluid and feels very natural which is a big deal in these type of third person games, it snaps in to a closer view every time you point your gun up and snaps back to a wider angle whenever you are running. The music selection is another great plus to this game, they got everything from the classic Creedence Clearwater Revival to James Brown and it always seem to blend well with the 60-70s environment.
The map in this game is certainly large, with different environments from high class society to slum areas and there are a lot of places to explore. But when it comes to exploration, it can get boring rather quickly since most of the time you will end up looking for collectables which are quite useless in the game, and the side missions are usually assassinations which are generally too easy. The map however is useful up to a point since it shows all the “junction boxes” which you can find spread across the entire city. The one thing missing in this game is ‘quick travel’ and that means if you want to go from one location to another, you will have to drive all the way there and sometimes if you are on one end of the city and the mission is on the other end of it, you will have to spend around 5 minutes or more, simply driving to that location. It may not seem like a lot, but the constant need to drive from one location to another can get rather boring at times.
At the end of each mission, our hero Lincoln sits down with his underbosses and decides who should run that territory and this decision is critical since it will ultimately affect the storyline and the outcome of the game. If one of the boss isn’t happy with the decision you made, they may turn against you and become your enemy instead. But all three underbosses have their own strengths so you have to take that into consideration when making a decision.
This game is worth trying if you are a fan of GTA, and since it has great replay value due to the many ways the storyline plays out, you can easily spend a lot of time playing it over and over again and with such great characters in the game, it really does make you feel like you know each of them personally.
Mafia III is available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
