COSA NO-SIR

MAFIA: THE OLD COUNTRY is a failed experiment

- By Joshua Wolens

The Mafia series has never had a clue what to do with its open world. In Mafia, the city of Lost Heaven was all set dressing. In Mafia 2, all the side activities that would have rounded out the base game were carved off to be flogged to you later as DLC. Mafia 3's side activities made for an endless cycle of clearing the same damn goons out of the same damn warehouse.

So if there's anything shocking about Mafia: The Old Country trading in the series' rambling, aimless maps for a strict focus on its main plot, it's only that it hadn't been done sooner. It's ostensibly the clear right move, cutting out the cruft to concentrate on the mob tales that have always been what people actually like about these games. By rights, it should be a winning formula. It is not. The Old Country's rote crime story can't bear the weight of keeping you interested even at a svelte 13-hour runtime (compared to the prior game's 40).

Whatever your gripes with Mafia 3, I still fell in love with that game because, regardless of anything else, there's something to be said for screaming down the highway in a red corvette listening to Eve of Destruction on the radio, pausing intermittently to hop out and punch racists. Take away that theme-park reconstruction of a particular era, and what are you left with? A shell of a story in a shell of a game.

GOD, FATHER
Mafia: The Old Country starts you out in the ratty miner's garb of Enzo Favara, a no-name Sicilian laborer who was more or less sold into slavery at five years old to pay off a portion of his father's debts. Which isn't a great start. An even worse start is what happens about 15 minutes after you hit new game: Mount-Etna-by-another-name gives a belch that collapses the mine on your head.