Mafia: The Old Country review – a forgettable but fairly enjoyable 10 hours

The best thing about Mafia: The Old Country is its setting. At least, how it looks. Its rendition of 1900s Sicily is the Italy from the postcard in your mind, with its rolling hills, vineyards undulating to the horizon, orange groves, dirt tracks and ruins. The sun sets, bursting its red guts on a lilac sky, framed by the boxy houses of the seaside town climbing their way up the cliffside overlooking the sea, as people mill around, cars kick up dust, and horseback riders gallop past.

It’s a refreshing change from America, a place we’ve seen rendered in so many ways it’s already burned into our minds. But there’s still a familiarity here – that port town postcard in your mind, an idyllic holiday destination, if it wasn’t for all the wise guys and knife fights.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the Mafia series is how it lets you sit with characters over decades of their life. Here you play as Enzo Favara, who starts the game as a lowly miner, becomes a farmhand, and eventually gets made. At the start of the game, he doesn’t even have shoes. By the end, he’s rocking three-piece suits and pocketwatches, driving around in classic convertible cars.

In the early Mafia games, Empire Bay – its fictional amalgamation of New York and Chicago – changed along with the characters. It wasn’t an open world in the traditional sense, but it shifted and altered with the passing years. New car models appeared on the road, seasons came and went, and fresh buildings shot up on the skyline. That’s where The Old Country falls short; apart from a natural disaster bubbling away as the story comes to a climax, the world is static and wasted. It’s set dressing. Even the developers don’t care whether you engage with it or not, as evidenced by the fact you can skip almost every major car or horse journey. This is a story and it goes in one direction at a fast pace — no room for distractions.

“You think they’ll take it easy on you out there, Enzo? Don’t take it too badly, I’ve had a lot of practice.” This is what a mafioso said to me after a knife fight tutorial where I absolutely bodied him and didn’t take a single hit. You can’t stop this train.

Developer Hangar 13 loves to overcorrect. Some people criticised the first two Mafia games for not taking advantage of their open worlds, and we ended up with Mafia 3 — the worst game in the series thanks to its open world structure and repetitive mission design. Now Hangar 13 has corrected again and it’s resulted in a much better game, but one where an incredible world is woefully underutilized.

It’s all very by-the-numbers too. You start off doing menial tasks until someone puts a gun in your hand. You slowly build trust with the organization and get asked to do bigger jobs and shoot more men. There’s a bit where you become a racing driver. There’s an overarching story of forbidden love that goes exactly where you expect it to.

But all of this is carried by brilliant performances from the main cast, as well as some incredible character animation. The Old Country’s characters have some of the most expressive eyes I’ve ever seen in a video game. The dialogue writing and performances make an otherwise vanilla story punch above its weight and keep you entertained throughout its ten-hour runtime.

It has some cool setpieces, too. One standout sees a sniper taking potshots on saints’ day, and you’re forced to move through the crowd as people are shot all around you. What follows is an excellent rooftop chase sequence as colored smoke bombs dot the sky and confetti rains from every window.

Of course, a lot of the game plays itself. I turned off auto lock-on for shooting to give my brain something to do, but shooting is about as bland as it gets. Stealth is barebones and easy to exploit, and it also lacks polish. Grab someone from around cover and you’ll choke them standing, rather than dragging them down concealed behind cover. Knife fights have the depth of Hellblade 2’s combat (puddle-deep, basically, not a massive distance from that Golden Saucer minigame in Final Fantasy 7). Driving is great, but optional for the most part and only how you’ll spend about 10% of your time.

2K did the right thing by launching it at a relatively budget price, and the release date means there’s little for it to compete with so I’m sure it’ll do well. Still, there’s something here. It’s a solid B game. It’ll keep you pushing through for its short runtime and then you’ll turn it off and you’ll fuhgeddaboudit pretty quickly.