a narrative whose political boldness in the AAA space is only matched by the machinegames wolfensteins that you might not wanna see all of if the safest of checklist gameplay loops gets on your nerves

i dropped this game the first time i tried it
i had played through the reimagining of the first and the definitive release of the second mafia games before giving this a proper shot back when they were all put out
i was hooked by the narrative and how focused it was for the first few hours or so, but once what you're actually gonna be doing for the majority of your playthrough revealed itself to me
combined with it running like shit on my system of the time
i bid farewell to this and figured i'd finish it later when i had a better machine and some mods that helped the game out

fast forward three years and i did just that
the mods were very basic and i only implemented them after giving the vanilla experience another shot
things like improving the crosshair and adding a few more immersive elements (that i later began to dislike but i will not blame the game for that or account for it here, this game isn't built to play with rules that the other mafia games have and that's what i was trying to go for)
and hey, the game was butter smooth on my current system which is relatively mid range these days
but what wasn't smooth was the game's general technical polish
because there were enough times that i had to reload checkpoints or reset the game entirely (when the game wasn't doing it for me - this thankfully didn't happen often but it was more than a couple) that i felt like even noting it here
the game generally doesn't look very good for the time it came out either and i don't mean the graphical fidelity itself
the anti aliasing solution is incredibly frustrating and as a fan of the newer resident evil games that's saying something
the colors are also very washed out, an issue that the definitive edition made worse
thankfully, one of the mods i implemented was a reshade that is the most downloaded mod for this game on nexusmods
this is as someone who normally doesn't like most reshade presets you'll find online

but that really isn't the core issue with this game - i have played and greatly enjoyed games with far worse technical issues
this game is a fucking slog to get through
the moment to moment gameplay is great, i do not have an issue with any of the actual gunplay
the driving is so-so, it's vastly improved when you have access to better vehicles and it doesn't take long to get there
the actual blueprint for what you do makes sense, this game would not have been as effective if it was linear in the same way the other games were considering what it is trying to go for
no, what sucks is that there's so fucking much of it to do and it's all the same simple bullshit
talk to a dude who knows something about a district's racket, go around the district and hit up locations to fuck shit up and cause a lot of damage
get the runners of these rackets pissed so they show up at a place that you've probably already been to
and go end their shit (or not, you can spare people in this game but i can't comment on whether it's worth it or not because i killed all these dudes)
assign the racket to your chosen buddy and move on
do that twice in a district, get the story missions that actually have effort put into their structure
and move on until you've cleared the map
then end the game
it's really that simple
there is no big mechanical twist, there is no massive upgrade to your arsenal that makes the gameplay suddenly exciting
you just get incrementally better at doing what was already pretty easy to do in the first place
it's barebones as hell and by god is that a shame

this is some of my favorite writing in AAA gaming and its solely because of its bluntness
america being a racist shithole that will chew up and spit out every black body it can is a given
there is no question, no counter point to rebuke the evil that is the american empire
lincoln clay is a monster of america's creation
a black boy shipped out to vietnam and taught to do far worse than kill who comes back and is immediately taken advantage of by a white man that sees an opportunity
a man motivated by his deep pockets that sees clay and his family as nothing more than slurs to be used
a crime boss, a businessman, an owner of capital that fails to tie up that one loose end
and every bit of pain, rage and cunning that the state gave clay is what that man will get in return
and new bordeaux becomes yet another battlefield where non combatants are hurt the most

the characters are fairly consistent in that nuance, though it falls short of the highs that previous titles could hit
i think it makes up for that in its boldness and frame - taking down the racist cunts that think spewing slurs is a personality is very cathartic
rarely is this challenged - it's often egged on, and one can't really blame anybody for wanting this
but the game's best character comes in the form of the sole voice of dissent
watching a few clips of father james is all you really need to see what i'm getting at when i say just how utterly disappointing it is to play through all this slop
because the folks over at hangar 13 were capable of creating a character whose emotional ressonance alone completely makes this game
he is one of the reasons to go through this - i love every scene this man is in (in the main game - the dlcs suck and you should only do faster baby, that is my review of the dlcs)
he completely grounds the games events, primarily through the game's novel framing of being a documentary about the events that take place within the game itself
it's him talking about lincoln, expressing all of his sadness and regret of enabling lincoln to do what he does
shit like that, the nuance in what is on the surface pretty straight forward writing is what elevates the mafia games and seperates them from the muck that this game specifically would otherwise be

i think you should definitely play this, there's a LOT of stuff that i did not talk about because of that, but install mods that either half the racket damage or completely disable it (do the former, it's the main way you get a decent chunk of your money in the game but you also really don't need it if you just rush faster baby and get the silenced mac 10 lol)
because this game is, again, a slog and it's very frustrating given how excellent this game's writing tends to be

this is the rebuttal to every shit head that said mafia should be an open world game first and foremost