I'll come back to this for a full review and score once I'm done, but I just had to make note of some things after a few hours (the PS5 isn't tracking me on this one for some reason) at what feels like the halfway point of the game.
To start, the game brings over some of the things I found really unique about Mafia III, particularly its fishtail-heavy but oh-so-fun driving engine and substantial abuse of lighting to provide some really overwhelming glare effects but also some B-tier Saint Denis in the rain type atmosphere with crazy lightning. Hangar 13, if nothing else, knows how to make a rain storm appealing.
That said, while I can see how impressive this story would've been back in 2002, I can't believe that this is being passed off as a more in-depth, naturalistic portrayal of that story updated for modern audiences. This is no better evidenced than two bits of dialogue that are almost immediately dismissed - early in the game Tommy admits to a problem with bathtub gin that led him to giving up the hooch, only for him to accept several swigs of alcohol throughout the story without as much as a grimace. Around the point I'm pressing pause now, the Don of your chosen family suspects his business partner for most of his life of espionage, tying the likely cause to...something he did to a dog when they were kids? What?
The writing in this game is full of stuff like that, and because it's trying to tell a linear story over roughly a decade's worth of time the lack of character building via side stories or even diegetic moments in the open world is quite glaring. Mafia III wasn't always immune to this problem, which I think speaks to a general imbalance between Hangar 13's ambitions and their acumen, but these characters' lives move too quickly for the player to have any interest in it. Tommy goes from bachelor to married in about two hours, though almost all of the "intermezzo" can't explain the how of such a huge life choice because it's gameplay, and gameplay means cars and guns.
Lastly, I've been fascinated by a sort of feeling I've been searching to find a term for ever since the launch version of Final Fantasy VII Remake on PS4. There are some infamous moments (since patched out) during the early Midgar exploration segments where you can see a PS5-like Cloud standing in a late-gen PS4 environment surrounded by PS2-era textures talking to PS3-type mannequin NPCs. I found that utterly fascinating, and Mafia: Definitive Edition is taking that to an entirely different level through it's alchemical failure of mission design, cutscene direction, facial animation, audio fidelity and so much more.
It's quite a curio, in other words, and I'm almost sorry to say I'll probably have much more to say about it in a week or so.
...And now that I've finished, it turns out I kind of don't? While you can go back to watch the original game's cutscenes and get a sense of how ambitious it must have felt back then, it turns out Mafia didn't really have much of a story to tell nor the high budget, talented Hollywood voice crew Rockstar could muster and so that ambition mostly looks like what we've come to learn is pretty standard European developer overreach in terms of storytelling. If you've seen just about any mafia movie you'll know every beat of this thing before you've met a single side character, and again because the story is covering such a broad stretch of time in a pretty rapid fire manner (it took me just 7 hours to finish this game) story beats feel like exactly that and nothing more - unearned and bland.
While the voice acting is marginally better this time around, the audio quality is pretty universally terrible. Pauly doesn't sound like a real person, like, EVER, while Sam often slips into a rough interpretation of Ren from Ren & Stimpy and Tommy, for whatever reason, seems to have made a point to breath heavily onto the microphone as often as possible. It's a breathy, nasally game in general and almost never achieves the level of verisimilitude necessary to make voice acting worth having. I have to imagine this more than anything is a casualty of being developed during the height of the COVID pandemic so it's hard to completely fault the game for it...but it's also impossible to ignore.
This is exacerbated by some pretty rudimentary facial animation (not to mention distracting false eyelashes on every single face) that obfuscates whatever emotions these characters are hinting at behind dead eyes and creepy smiles.
The weirdest thing about this game is that it feels trapped in two eras at once. On the one hand, this makes for the rare remake of an old game that makes little effort to modernize what made it tick originally, but on the other it looks so modern and imports just enough of the most recent game's more annoying mechanics (namely, the puppet-like enemy AI that operate more like an arcade lightgun shooter than 3rd person cover shooter enemies) that it feels like a half-step.
To start, the game brings over some of the things I found really unique about Mafia III, particularly its fishtail-heavy but oh-so-fun driving engine and substantial abuse of lighting to provide some really overwhelming glare effects but also some B-tier Saint Denis in the rain type atmosphere with crazy lightning. Hangar 13, if nothing else, knows how to make a rain storm appealing.
That said, while I can see how impressive this story would've been back in 2002, I can't believe that this is being passed off as a more in-depth, naturalistic portrayal of that story updated for modern audiences. This is no better evidenced than two bits of dialogue that are almost immediately dismissed - early in the game Tommy admits to a problem with bathtub gin that led him to giving up the hooch, only for him to accept several swigs of alcohol throughout the story without as much as a grimace. Around the point I'm pressing pause now, the Don of your chosen family suspects his business partner for most of his life of espionage, tying the likely cause to...something he did to a dog when they were kids? What?
The writing in this game is full of stuff like that, and because it's trying to tell a linear story over roughly a decade's worth of time the lack of character building via side stories or even diegetic moments in the open world is quite glaring. Mafia III wasn't always immune to this problem, which I think speaks to a general imbalance between Hangar 13's ambitions and their acumen, but these characters' lives move too quickly for the player to have any interest in it. Tommy goes from bachelor to married in about two hours, though almost all of the "intermezzo" can't explain the how of such a huge life choice because it's gameplay, and gameplay means cars and guns.
Lastly, I've been fascinated by a sort of feeling I've been searching to find a term for ever since the launch version of Final Fantasy VII Remake on PS4. There are some infamous moments (since patched out) during the early Midgar exploration segments where you can see a PS5-like Cloud standing in a late-gen PS4 environment surrounded by PS2-era textures talking to PS3-type mannequin NPCs. I found that utterly fascinating, and Mafia: Definitive Edition is taking that to an entirely different level through it's alchemical failure of mission design, cutscene direction, facial animation, audio fidelity and so much more.
It's quite a curio, in other words, and I'm almost sorry to say I'll probably have much more to say about it in a week or so.
...And now that I've finished, it turns out I kind of don't? While you can go back to watch the original game's cutscenes and get a sense of how ambitious it must have felt back then, it turns out Mafia didn't really have much of a story to tell nor the high budget, talented Hollywood voice crew Rockstar could muster and so that ambition mostly looks like what we've come to learn is pretty standard European developer overreach in terms of storytelling. If you've seen just about any mafia movie you'll know every beat of this thing before you've met a single side character, and again because the story is covering such a broad stretch of time in a pretty rapid fire manner (it took me just 7 hours to finish this game) story beats feel like exactly that and nothing more - unearned and bland.
While the voice acting is marginally better this time around, the audio quality is pretty universally terrible. Pauly doesn't sound like a real person, like, EVER, while Sam often slips into a rough interpretation of Ren from Ren & Stimpy and Tommy, for whatever reason, seems to have made a point to breath heavily onto the microphone as often as possible. It's a breathy, nasally game in general and almost never achieves the level of verisimilitude necessary to make voice acting worth having. I have to imagine this more than anything is a casualty of being developed during the height of the COVID pandemic so it's hard to completely fault the game for it...but it's also impossible to ignore.
This is exacerbated by some pretty rudimentary facial animation (not to mention distracting false eyelashes on every single face) that obfuscates whatever emotions these characters are hinting at behind dead eyes and creepy smiles.
The weirdest thing about this game is that it feels trapped in two eras at once. On the one hand, this makes for the rare remake of an old game that makes little effort to modernize what made it tick originally, but on the other it looks so modern and imports just enough of the most recent game's more annoying mechanics (namely, the puppet-like enemy AI that operate more like an arcade lightgun shooter than 3rd person cover shooter enemies) that it feels like a half-step.