Mafia 3: I Built the Mob to Destroy the Mob

Though He's a total scumbag, it hurt to see Don Marconi watch as his empire and family die. In the end he used everything, and even then it wasn't enough.

Mafia 3 gave me a lot of mixed feelings, and when I say mixed, I mean really mixed. There's a good deal to unpack here, and while the outcome is a game that I'll most likely never play again, there's still a lot of good (even great) stuff that Mafia 3 does. It does a fantastic job at world building, with an unusual amount of depth/humanity given to all parties (in particular the gangsters) in addition to great cinematics and voice acting. However, despite these great things, there's so much bad, nonsensical, and honestly baffling things going on here that makes one wonder if these were caused by budget or time issues. It's a game that definitely could have been great, but what we got is somewhere around mediocre and poor.

Despite brutally murdering nearly every foe he meets (and leaving the others to die), Clay is actually a pretty likable and charismatic protagonist throughout the game.

At the basic level, and I mean basic, the game never goes beyond this theme, the story of Mafia 3 is one about revenge. An eye for an eye, you kill my friends and family, I'll do the same to you (except also kill you). It's a tried and true video game cliche at this point, because that's the easiest way to make what passes for a compelling narrative. The incident in question is when after the robbery of a federal reserve by Lincoln Clay and his 3 friends on the orders of Don Sal Marcano, Sal and his men (including one of Clay's friends) murder Lincoln's mob friends and family and mistakenly leave him alive. After spending months convalescent in the home of his priest mentor Lincoln wakes up, returns to his now burned home, retrieves his gear that he brought home from Vietnam, and readies to go on the warpath to burn down Sal's empire in retaliation. However, this is also an open-world game, so it can't be a nice, simple linear adventure, it has to be at least 20 hours to justify its existence for some reason. Clay's entire beef with Sal is personal, he doesn't seem to have any beef on paper against the Italian Mafia specifically, so why do you have to dismantle the mob? A character at one point even questions why there needs to be all this complicated mob racket takeover stuff when since your beef is with the Don when you could just go to his place and smoke him. The more you think about it, the less the story makes sense, especially in regards to to the advertising of this game, which revolved around the idea that you were in this to destroy the mob. There really should have been an asterisk by that phrase, because through the course of the game you do in fact destroy the mob--the Italian mob, so there you could say that it was a promise kept. However, in the process you also make a new, stronger mob (consciously I might add), so really the tagline is a big fat lie. Gripes about the tagline and the story being bogged down by the gamey elements aside, the story is executed pretty well and I found it to be memorable. Clay himself, as in all of these open-world games, is essentially the predator compared to his foes, being far better trained and fit than basically anyone he meets. Now, there's actually a reason as to this, which is much more than we usually get in these games (looking at you Far Cry 3-5). It's really quite simple, you were special forces in Vietnam, which by itself sounds kind of lame when put that way, but it's actually elaborated on in the story. It's always good when there's a basis in reality for a protagonist's abilities that is actually explained. Throughout it you also see that your actions do have an impact on the mob, and while in many games it feels like these opposing organizations have unlimited resources, in Mafia 3 the mafia gets more weak and desperate the farther you get into it. In one of the last cinematic before the climax, Sal essentially breaks down in tears, not because you just won't die (although yeah that's a big reason too), but because he's spent practically everything he has trying to go legit and to get rid of Clay. You don't face elite, military-grade soldiers in the final confrontation, just a small posse that's the remainder of Sal's forces. It's an oddly humanizing end to this game's principle antagonist, and I quite liked that aspect. The DLC stories (of which there are 3) are each very good, telling vastly different stories with no overlapping elements. You investigate a blood cult in Signs of the Times, experience a spy action flick in Stones Unturned, and take on a racist sheriff in a 'sundown town' in Faster Baby. On top of just their variedness, each also gives the spotlight to characters who weren't very developed in the main game such as your CIA buddy Donovan. At the end of the day though, I enjoyed the story told by Mafia 3, for while it was the same basic faire as most of these games nowadays, it has a depth that I haven't seen in a long time from a triple A title.

Father James acts as the sole voice of reason (never enabling Clay) throughout as well as one of our disillusioned narrators

Gameplay is another mixed bag, filled with stuff that found really enjoyable, but also stuff that I truly despised. As mentioned before, the open world, it sucks. There's absolutely no interactivity despite stuff like shops being marked on your map. The limit to their interactivity is that you can rob their registers and steal medicine and maybe ammunition from them, that's it. Until you face the leader of the district, you have to take out their two captains, and these play out the exact same goddamn way every time. It's monotonous, cookie-cutter, and is entirely just padding. To its credit though, the lieutenant and capo missions are all different and unique in how they play out and in their setting. These are actually really fun, but it's not fun to have to do the same slog before getting to the good stuff every time. Every time you have to fight enemies it's really the same thing, stealthy approach while trying to kill as many enemies as possible before your discovered. Eventually I had enough of this and only did stealth until I eliminated all the sentries, and then it was Quickdraw McGraw time with my pistol in bullet-time. But why would every engagement be initially stealthy? Well, this game is pretty realistic, as in every bullet hits like a truck, and while you can instantly heal, Clay is pretty fragile. Furthermore, you're always outnumbered and on top of this, the enemy has sentries, guys who realistically call for backup from the nearest phone as soon as shit hits the fan. Stealth is also pretty cool, enemies remark and get suspicious when they hear a strange noise that their pal investigated (and didn't return), also getting edgy when they find a body (which triggers an area search) or when they hear multiple whistles. It's novel, but at the end of the day they're still pretty dumb when it comes to stealth. They will always fall to the first whistle, regardless of their type. To even further complicate matters bystanders are also a liability here, as being upstanding and/or racist citizens they'll ring the police as soon as shots start being fired. A cool little detail in regards to the police (who are utterly relentless when called to the scene) is that their response times and the urgency of the dispatcher greatly vary depending on the wealth/demographic of the district where the crime occurs. Another cool detail is that the police don't immediately know your location. They go to the immediate area, check it out, and if they don't find anything they fan out and search the nearby area, giving chase if they see you. However, as soon as you get your posse together the challenge of the police goes out the window. You can instantly stop the cops from chasing you (they literally vanish), get them to ignore crimes for a period of time, or even get the phones in the area shut off. It's stupidly powerful, and you get these in the first third of the game. I also hope that you like driving, because you'll be doing a lot of it in this game, frequently going across the map for various missions. At least you have four pretty darn good and atmospheric radio stations with distinct radio hosts. At the core though, the gameplay is just boring for much of the game, never really allowing you to try something new, though the DLC each is unique from the main story in how they play and feel, so again in that regard they're very good.

Bullet time is a one-way ticket to feeling like a badass, with an added level of fairness to your enemies and rewards for pinpoint accuracy that can lead to insane feats that would put even Big Iron to shame.

In keeping with the theme of mixed feelings throughout, the look and feel of Mafia 3 is also a mixed bag, and it's here where I think that the possible budget issues/rushed production really show themselves. It's a good-looking game, but it just seems off somehow. The cinematics in this game are awesome. They're frequent in story moments, but they're not very long. You see great performances by the voice actors, good cinematography, lighting, and they're each different. The overarching story is delivered in two ways (in addition to in the moment storytelling), the first being interview footage from a fictional 2002 documentary with law enforcement officials and a few now much older characters from the main story talking about Lincoln Clay and his rampage. The second is archival footage from a 1970ish senate hearing starring your buddy Donovan talking about your adventures together. However, the conversations outside cinematics (this doesn't include over the radio) with Clay and his contact which acts as the quest giver for you to begin your rampage on an aspect of a district are so fucking bad. You have an awkward camera angle combined with the two flatly giving each other lines almost emotionlessly. It really just seems like they ran out of time here, which I can't understand honestly. The basic enemies are very repetitive, each looking very much the same while having three, maybe four variations. The goddamn sentries literally all have the same look, and the fact that there's a big 'sentry' over their heads essentially takes out any of the mystery. The settings for these lieutenant and capo takedowns themselves are pretty damn cool though, being different and showing off the different aspects of sixties southern culture well. Besides the car radios, the music is basically nonexistent in this game, and I never once noticed it. However, to their credit music placement is pretty natural, and though you've gotten out of your car, you might still hear the song you were just on coming from a radio, distant and far away. The general atmosphere is pretty strong though, and you'll learn all sort of new words and slurs for other people (I mean it is 1968 discount New Orleans) on top of not being allowed in many businesses due to Jim Crow laws. I don't understand though some of the decisions when it came to world design in this game though. Why make a discount New Orleans, just call it that, you have Mardi Gras in this city anyway (when it takes place in New Orleans). On top of this, why is there a discount KKK in this game, why not the real one? Jesus, it's the Klan, they're like the Nazis--easy antagonists and scum of the earth. It just doesn't make much sense, but what else is new in this game? The strongest point in here, besides the cinematics, is surprisingly the collectables, which each show a different aspect of the culture of the time. You'll find Playboy magazines, Vargas pinup paintings, album covers, hot rod magazines, and evangelical publications, all of which have cool secondary functions which allow you to learn more about what each was all about. This is the only time I've encountered something like this in a game, and while none of this stuff was really new to me I really liked its inclusion, further helping immerse you in the time period. Of all the mixed feelings I have about this game, the presentation of Mafia 3 is what I have the most positive opinion about, for while it still has very noticeable stumbles, there's clearly been a lot of care and effort put into this title, and it does show, though in stages.

I didn't give two tosses about my mob friends, it just felt wrong to help them, but at least we got to see more than just Italians having criminal organizations in this outing.

At the end of the day, I'd say that you can pass on Mafia 3, though it might be worth a look for people looking for an open-world that's based more in reality and history than most games. I really enjoyed some parts of this, but others really sucked. I think that it would have been much better as a linear game, maybe something like GTA V. All the pieces were there, but the final product was almost sad. It's a real shame that this game came out the way it did, because it really seemed like it just needed more time/a larger budget, but I guess we'll never see the great game it could have been. Oh well, there's always more out there, but perhaps not for the Mafia franchise if this one is anything to go off of.

Though I didn't really enjoy the non-mission parts of Mafia 3, the DLC adventures are actually a ton of fun and show what this game could have been in both looks and execution in a linear format.