PREAMBLE: If you find yourself playing a 2K game, make sure you disable 2K launcher after your initial start up. It is a program that uses up an ungodly amount of your CPU resources. Go to your "Properties" options in settings, copy paste the address of your .exe location in quotation marks, and then type %command% afterward. Doing this will solve your problem of stuttering, choppy framerates, and/or bad background program performance. Mafia III: Definitive Edition thankfully also has an option to flat out disable the launcher in the main menu, so you can use that too.

I don't drop my games most of the time, I like to play through them through and through to see if a game gets better at a certain point, or I just truck onward because its the middle point of a big series... but man, I just cannot bring myself to complete Mafia III and it is HEARTBREAKING that's the case because the story was so great in the beginning. To start your story off by establishing it in the 1960's with the most harrowing parts of the nation's history was ballsy. The way people interact with new main character Lincoln Clay is heartbreaking too, turning what was supposed to be his return home into a Heart of Darkness story where he cannot afford to trust anyone. I was feeling the Rambo: First Blood vibe the game was giving off for the first seven hours, and then it just all fell apart from there.

I didn't mind doing the busy work for the lieutenants at first. It gave the game interesting character moments, especially between Lincoln and series mainstay Vito Scaletta, but then I realized that its all the game had to offer. You drive, shoot, drive, interrogate, drive, shoot, drive, interrogate ad nauseam. There is little narrative drive to these, it is completely banal.

It had only taken me 10 hours to beat the first two games each (mind you I didn't even like the first one very much either), 8 hours into this one and I'm stuck doing Assassins Creed 1 levels of bloat because Hangar13 wasn't confident that their story was compelling enough, so they had to stuff filler into the main story. If Hangar13 didn't cave to the baseless critiques of Mafia II and just sold Mafia III as just its story instead, it would have been so much better, but that's not what we got. Its so sad because not many games tackle the subject matter of Mafia III, but I can't be bothered to put 20 more hours into a battered and mistreated experience.