Mafia: The Old Country is well-titled. Playing it gives the distinct impression of an “old” game, something that should have been released in 2013 rather than 2025. While the setting is beautiful and the nods to previous games are appreciated, I can’t help but feel disappointed once the credits roll. At the end of the day I can’t shake the feeling that Mafia: The Old Country is the inverse of Mafia III, for the better and for the worse.
Mafia III was divisive, to say the least. It had excellent writing, excellent casting, an overall excellent story in all regards; it also had the most repetitive gameplay imaginable, and far too much of it at that. At the time I felt this was a shame, because the first two Mafia games were some of my favorite videogames of all time.
Let’s talk about ’empty’ open worlds
Much has been written and espoused on Mafia, Mafia II, and (perhaps most notoriously, given the developer pedigree) L.A. Noire about the negative aspects of “empty open world games.” I’m not here to defend those choices – actually, wait, yes I am.
Let’s start with L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s 1940-1960 Los Angeles crime drama. There is nothing to do in the open world of Los Angeles besides solve the crimes and act like a police officer. Rockstar clearly spent the majority of development time and money into the facial animations, and that’s okay. To me, I justify this with one simple piece of head canon; Cole Phelps died in the war. This is all a dream of what his life could have been like, how the guilt of what he did will continue to haunt him no matter what. Through this lens, the empty open world makes perfect sense.
And it’s not entirely empty in the same sense Mafia: The Old Country is. Pedestrians and NPCs react to you. There are buildings to enter. You can drive most vehicles you find. You can play in the sandbox, a little.
Mafia and Mafia II are similar, but with slightly more interactivity. It may feel harder to “break away” and explore the world, as the design of the series necessitates that you are almost always in some sort of story mission, but you have the ability to go off the beaten path and explore here and there, especially in the mornings and evenings. In these games, you can hijack vehicles, attack civilians, avoid or attract police attention, and must keep track of things like how much gas your vehicle has. While the world is lacking side content like hidden collectibles scattered around the map and challenges, there is stuff to do. It’s a living, breathing world.
In an effort to break away from this mission-based design, Hanger 13 designed Mafia III to be the most “traditional” open world game in the series. Mafia III had what I would call side content, but it copy-pasted that side content all over the map, far, far too many times. It swerved too far in the opposite direction, losing all the tightness and direction the series had been known for. Mafia III, despite having perhaps the best story in the series, was ultimately a chore and a slog to play.
In the years since, Hanger 13 remastered Mafia and Mafia II, sanding down some of the rougher edges but still delivering solid experiences. That gave them more experience with the series, and I hoped some of the earlier games’ lessons would have stuck with them when I first saw the trailer for Mafia: The Old County. Some clearly have, but, well, you know when you swerve too far while driving on ice and then jerk the wheel in the complete opposite direction and send yourself and your vehicle into a death spin that ends with a loud crash?
New Mafia game pretty, boring
Mafia: The Old Country is a painfully boring experience, a statement I really did not want to have to write. It’s also incredibly dated in terms of game design; levels always include slow walking sections with NPCs that don’t quite match your pace, stealth sections that encourage you to throw bottles and coins to distract guards, forced combat sections (which occur whether or not you successfully stealthed your way to the target) filled with chest-high walls for cover-based combat.
The story of Mafia: The Old Country is painfully predictable, a plot which can be accurately guessed from beginning to end around the 30-min mark. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something to happen to make this feel like a story worth telling, but it’s just a worse retelling of the original Mafia with some extra steps. There’s even a race for you to [Leo points at TV screen meme] at.
The open world of Mafia: The Old Country is empty in an entirely new way from those previously mentioned. In those games, the world at least noticed you. The NPCs in Mafia and Mafia II are aware you exist. In Mafia: The Old Country, walking around any non-current mission area is basically the same thing as being a ghost. You can throw a grenade into a group of NPCs and nothing happens. There is practically no interactivity, with pretty much anything, except for the occasional story NPC with a contextual button prompt marker which has a 50% chance of actually working as a button prompt.
I can’t remember the last time I played a game where I had to reset the mission because an NPC was blocking the doorway I needed to go through, but it happened while playing Mafia: The Old Country.
It’s a very pretty game. The music is good. The Sicilian dialog (something which inexplicably was not available at launch?) is well-delivered. Everything else, to me, as a long-time Mafia series enjoyer, falls quite short. The things I loved about Mafia – the realism, the need to act like an actual human in front of police officers, a unique take on the mafioso plot – aren’t to be found here.
The knife fights are kind of fun, at least. Interesting way to do ‘boss battles’ in this sort of experience. But did we really need boss battles in a Mafia game in the first place?
THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDED MEDIA:
The following video is an update to an interview which we originally ran in January 2025. See that coverage here: How to Save Your Video Games ► Ludology Now! ft. Ross Scott
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