Mafia The Old Country review – a beautiful but trivial take on what a crime gangster epic should be

The next entry in 2K's wildly immersive gangster franchise aims to wind the clock back to the start, but in the process forgets to evolve its gameplay formula in any meaningful way.

When in doubt, go back to the very beginning. Batman did it, Rise of the Planet of the Apes did it, and now it’s the turn of 2K’s solid (if somewhat uneven) gangster series to give it a try by winding the clock all the way back to 1900s Sicily. I honestly don’t blame developer Hanger 13 for taking this approach. Because while its remake of the first entry, 2020’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, successfully revived a classic, the studio’s last attempt to push the franchise into all-new territory with Mafia 3 didn’t quite work out so well.

Unfortunately, despite looking incredible and weaving a well-written tale with characters I came to care about greatly, on the gameplay side it’s a similar story here again. Turns out the setting, however beautiful, isn’t the only thing old-fashioned about Mafia: The Old Country.

Starting off with the good: the location of Valle Dorata must surely go down in history as one of the most stunning, awe-inspiring places to explore in a video game ever. Though not especially large or sprawling, it makes up for this lack of size with an incredible amount of detail and variety present in almost every region you visit both in and outside of the campaign.

From historic castle ruins that hint at times gone by and abundance of pastoral towns full of life, to the seemingly endless rows of vineyards that surround, not once while playing through Mafia: The Old Country’s 12-hour campaign did I ever fail to be immersed. This is an amazing rendition of early 20th century Sicily packed full of detail and reasons to want to stick around. If only the game gave you any real reason to…

See, much like the first two games in the series, Mafia: The Old Country again finds itself caught between two worlds. On one hand it takes place within an amazing open-world location you’ll spend plenty of trips driving through, but then outside of a few collectibles, there’s not really any real reason to do so.

In fairness, Hanger 13 has been totally open about The Old Country being a linear game through and through, but then why tease us with the promise of something greater – and dare I say braver – if you're not going to deliver on its full potential?

The benefit of keeping this Mafia prequel mostly on rails is that it’s easy to stay invested in the narrative with hardly any distractions. Placing you in the shoes of new protagonist Enzo Favara, you’ll follow his journey from beleaguered orphan to criminal gangster, getting up to no good and into all kinds of crime-related scrapes a long the way.

Cars and weapons being mostly limited in their technology during this era gives The Old Country a slightly different flavour to any other game in the series. And it's an element the game is extremely wise to lean into given just how similar Enzo’s overall story ends up being to Tommy Angelo from the first Mafia game.

Rather than break any new narrative ground, Mafia: The Old Country is instead all too happy to lean into several tropes and clichés the gangster film genre is known for. It’s in this regard where, aside from the utterly excellent motion-capture and voice performances, that this prequel ended up disappointing me most on the storytelling side of things.

Here you have a fairly unexplored environment and a completely new cast of characters to fill it with, yet time after time, The Old Country fall into the trappings of what cinema aficionados will undoubtedly expect. I won’t dig into these story beats too deeply for fear of spoiling the unsullied, but I’ll go as far as to say that the Don’s daughter, Isabella, and the nature of her relationship with the dashingly heroic Enzo hardly ends up being a mystery. Unrequited love, anyone?

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An offer to refuse

In this way, Mafia: The Old Country plays it far too safe at almost every turn, being all too happy to merely ‘play the hits’ as opposed to taking its unique setting and technology of the time, and doing something truly different with them. Four games in, you think there’d be a hunger for this on the developer side. But alas, it’s not usually the case, and very rarely did any story ‘twist’ end up shocking me. Enzo’s journey more often than not elicited a shrug as opposed to a gasp.

Sadly, this same old-school mentality also bleeds into the game’s approach to action. Mafia: The Old Country’s gameplay formula can essentially be boiled down into three main strands – cover shooting, driving, and stealth – and none are particularly boundary-pushing.

I wasn’t expecting Gears of War levels of gunplay here, but I could never shake the feeling that aiming as Enzo felt particularly floaty – even after trying out different firearms and equipping certain unlockable charms and beads specifically designed to counteract this. Luckily, when the cinematic shootouts do hit, they hit hard, and most usually occur as part of a larger set piece that culminates in an explosive climax such as a car chase or burning building escape.

Stealth, perhaps unsurprisingly, is also a mixed bag. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it per se, since throwing objects to distract enemies and sneaking behind them to either choke them out slowly or instant-kill them with a knife, are well-worn mechanical staples. Just because something is functional, though, doesn’t make it engrossing, especially when these scenarios crop up a lot. Driving, meanwhile, is very fun, particularly since the environments you move through are always a joy to be in.

The Mafia series has always had a great reputation for letting you get behind the wheel of a variety of historical cars, and this aspect returns here in full force. Better yet, the dedicated ‘carcyclopedia’ returns in The Old Country, allowing true petrolheads to pore over the full details of these ornate automobiles and then take them out to enjoy them in the game's dedicated Explore mode.

The final gameplay mechanic worth mentioning is a pretty irritating one. At various points in the story, in order to build up some degree of stakes through combat, The Old Country will pit you against a single foe in a one-on-one knife fight confrontation. Though not exactly a quick time event, the act of dodging, blocking, striking, and slashing eventually grows tiresome, particularly since no new mechanical elements are ever introduced at any point.

This is a game that starts with a knife fight and ends pretty much with the exact same knife fight, which might work as a method to let characters talk at close range and build drama, but is super repetitive from a gameplay perspective. I wish Hanger 13 would have found a different way to transform what should be a tension-filled set piece into something less predictable.

Mafia: The Old Country isn’t a complete disaster of a game, but it is very much a game out of time. In several ways it achieves what it sets out to do, setting players off on an engrossing, wildly cinematic, crime-fuelled gangster story set within a beautiful location with you at the centre of it.

Beauty, of course, is only skin deep, and when it comes to what you actually do in this world, Enzo’s journey climbing up through the ranks of the Torrisi crime family ends up feeling underbaked, unsurprising, and disappointingly old-school in its approach. Ultimately, The Old Country fails to make the most of its world’s uniqueness, as evidenced any time you must leave your vehicle to interact with it.

Review score: 2/5