I bought this in the current Xbox sale for about £8, having not played one of the Mafia games before, and polished it off over the last few evenings. I was expecting a knock-off GTA clone, but it's not, really. Instead, it's 20 completely linear narrative-led missions set in a relatively small, open-ish version of Prohibition era Chicago. You progress from one mission to the next consecutively, with no downtime in between; there are no side-quests or choices as to the order in which you complete each mission, and while you can (sort of) explore the world when you're driving from one part of each level to the next, there's no reason to do so as there's nothing to find. It feels very PS2-era in that regard (which makes sense, seeing as its a remake of a game from 2002), but I found the focus on the story missions with no open-world bloat padding out the runtime quite refreshing.
The missions themselves are...fine. You drive to places, shoot people and generally do lots of gangstery things. You hang out the windows of old-timey cars firing a Tommy gun. You steal lorries full of swag and drive them to lock-ups. You attach bombs to the undersides of rival mobsters' cars and then blow them up. You talk to people using words like 'Youse', 'Dames' and 'Gats' unironically. In fact, pretty much every gangster film cliché is ticked off here, including a section where you have to take someone out using a gun you find taped to the back of a toilet cistern.
Despite how hackneyed the writing and generally mediocre the gameplay is, however, I found the game overall had a certain charm to it - big seven-out-of-ten energy, as the kids say. The voice acting is surprisingly decent, and the story, as much as you've seen it all before, was sufficiently entertaining to keep me playing. The De Niro-lookalike main character, Tommy, is a hatchet man with a heart, and I found him endearing enough to see his story through to its inevitable, bloody conclusion. Despite playing this on the Xbox, nothing about is especially spectacular or technically demanding, and it only took me eight hours to finish, so I'd say it's probably better suited to the Steam Deck (and you can currently get it from CDKeys for less than seven pounds).v That said, I'm not in any rush to play Mafias 2 or 3 based on my time with this.
If you're after something undemanding and you enjoy the period of America that the game quite authentically portrays, then give it a go.
The missions themselves are...fine. You drive to places, shoot people and generally do lots of gangstery things. You hang out the windows of old-timey cars firing a Tommy gun. You steal lorries full of swag and drive them to lock-ups. You attach bombs to the undersides of rival mobsters' cars and then blow them up. You talk to people using words like 'Youse', 'Dames' and 'Gats' unironically. In fact, pretty much every gangster film cliché is ticked off here, including a section where you have to take someone out using a gun you find taped to the back of a toilet cistern.
Despite how hackneyed the writing and generally mediocre the gameplay is, however, I found the game overall had a certain charm to it - big seven-out-of-ten energy, as the kids say. The voice acting is surprisingly decent, and the story, as much as you've seen it all before, was sufficiently entertaining to keep me playing. The De Niro-lookalike main character, Tommy, is a hatchet man with a heart, and I found him endearing enough to see his story through to its inevitable, bloody conclusion. Despite playing this on the Xbox, nothing about is especially spectacular or technically demanding, and it only took me eight hours to finish, so I'd say it's probably better suited to the Steam Deck (and you can currently get it from CDKeys for less than seven pounds).v That said, I'm not in any rush to play Mafias 2 or 3 based on my time with this.
If you're after something undemanding and you enjoy the period of America that the game quite authentically portrays, then give it a go.