Mafia: The Old Country review: a game without an identity

A poignant line from the early hours of Mafia: The Old Country states that we can choose who we are, not what we do. I kept that line in my head as I experienced this historical take on the crime franchise. The further I dove into the world Hanger 13 has crafted, the less apt that quote felt. It isn’t just the fact that Mafia: The Old Country opted to take a more linear route than the last entry, but how the game itself never seems to settle on what it wants to be. This is a game struggling with an identity crisis that ends up crumbling as a result of disjointed gameplay systems and a protagonist who spends too long feeling like an observer than a driving force.

Mafia media and tropes are so well-known and ingrained into pop culture that creating a new story that is both authentic and engaging is borderline impossible. The Old Country‘s strategy is to go all the way back to the origins of the mafia in early 1900s Sicily and follow Enzo’s rise into the life of crime. At least in the case of the former, it is a wild success. Enzo’s story begins with promise, but he spends much too long feeling like he’s simply along for the ride.

Without a solid focus on what kind of game it needs to be or a protagonist with strong enough motivation to rally behind, the entire experience begins to fracture.

An offer you can’t refuse

As a franchise, the Mafia games each veered closer and closer to a GTA-like in terms of gameplay and structure. With Mafia: The Old Country, Hanger 13 decided to scale back the experience to a tight, focused experience. And while this isn’t a purely linear game, somehow its handful of gameplay systems all still feel barebones at best and clunky at worst.

Gunplay works, but not even the period-appropriate weapons can give it any sense of identity.

The three core pillars of The Old Country are third-person shooting, stealth, and one-on-one knife duels, although I could argue that walking, talking, and doing chores are the bulk of the gameplay. As I cycled through each, with some unique setpieces like race or chase sequences sprinkled in, I quickly realized there was no part of them that I was looking forward to. The gunplay is technically the best, but it is about as basic a cover shooter as you can get. Encounters all boil down to going into cover and playing stop-and-pop with the enemies. I might get rushed by an enemy here or there, or flushed out by a grenade, but this is about as forgettable a shooter as can be. Gunplay works, but not even the period-appropriate weapons can give it any sense of identity.

Stealth is perhaps a worse offender here. Enemy AI is comically braindead and doing each section as intended is needlessly tedious. The Old Country tries to take a page out of The Last of Us’s approach here by having long struggles as Enzo chokes out a guard, which can be skipped by using your knife at the cost of durability. Yet without the survival themes or intelligent AI backing it up, it feels like a time-waster. I can toss coins or bottles to distract enemies, and even activate a listen mode equivalent to see enemies through walls for some reason. I completely ignored the mechanic of picking up bodies to dump them into crates after my first few stealth missions when I realized there was no point in spending all that time picking them up and transporting them — not once was a body I choked out discovered before I snuck through the area.

this isn’t so much a world to be explored but a container for hundreds of collectibles.

Knife fighting was heavily marketed and could’ve been the feature The Old Country could hang its hat on. But not only does it not gel with the other two disparate gameplay modes, but taken on its own, it might be the weakest of them all. These duels bring the action in tight and swap the controls to something more akin to an action game, but feel weightless and unresponsive. There are two types of attacks, a dodge, a parry, and a guard break. Each move has its place and use, but the way duels play out never made me feel like I was mastering a system. Spacing and range always felt weird, and reading animations felt loose on everything but moves I was meant to dodge since they were the only ones accompanied by a visual indicator.

The moment I really began to question what The Old Country‘s identity was was when the game opened up. Hanger 13 made it clear this game wasn’t an open world, but that isn’t completely true. There is a decently sized hub world that, at points, I am free to explore by car. But much like Mafia 2, this isn’t so much a world to be explored or admired but a container for hundreds of collectibles. There are even vendors and later an apartment out there to visit, but the lack of waypoint system makes exploring or rounding up those collectibles a chore. It feels like a half-step into open world that confuses more than it adds.

Welcome to the family

The introduction to our new protagonist working slave laborer in a mine had tons of potential that was sadly never capitalized upon. Instead, Enzo abandons his early ambitions as soon as he makes his escape and is taken under the wing of the Torrisi family. At this point, he almost becomes a blank slate, just going along with no goals or personal motivations. A romance with the Don’s daughter is rushed along to give him some purpose later, but Enzo’s lack of personal stake in anything for the majority of the game makes it hard to get invested in his integration into the crime family.

Thankfully the supporting cast of mobsters is far stronger. Don Torrisi is a bit of your stereotypical raspy-voiced father figure who values family, honor, and loyalty above all, but the interplay between the straight-laced and kind Luca and the entitled and brash Ceasare is a standout. I loved getting to know them through the more episodic structure the first half of the game takes, but that slow burn ends up feeling meandering without Enzo having a consistent driver throughout. I spent the majority of the game feeling like I was doing a series of disassociated side quests that ran the gamut of mob activities.

I spent the majority of the game feeling like I was doing a series of disassociated side quests.

Mafia: The Old Country is a game at war with itself. None of the pieces it puts down fit together to form a unified picture. It lacks any standout gameplay system to build around, nor a strong character with clear motivations to give the game a distinct identity. It is a game that feels torn between multiple different directions, with the only piece left unscathed being the strong performances, an authentic historical setting, and the writing of the supporting cast. However, that can’t hold up a barebones gameplay experience and narrative hook that takes way too long to take hold. This is one offer you can safely refuse.

Mafia: The Old Country was tested on PC.