05/09/2025
Mafia: Definitive Edition – Beautiful Mediocrity
For the second month of Gameclube (our book club but for games https://backloggd.com/u/Kinbur/list/gameclube/), my hopes of late 90s Japanese experimentalism were dashed by the much more socially acceptable Mafia: Definitive Edition. A from the ground remake of the 2002 Czech release, Mafia looked to me, the uneducated lout I am, to be a GTA III clone. Having released a year after and having all the trappings of a GTA clone it seemed obvious what it was. Though I found myself meeting with GTA III’s older cinephile brother. This one grew up with a Godfather poster in his bedroom rather than listening to NWA. The game prides itself on being obtuse. It's a pastiche rather than a satire. The criminal with a good heart has never done much for me. I don’t find criminality cool or interesting so immediately when the group voted for this I was distraught that I'd have to render over 10 hours of my life to playing a video game. However, I had also just started watching Mad Men so I was enticed at the idea of seeing a man in a suit smoking some cigarettes.
Mafia makes no apologies that it loves this stuff. A team of developers who must’ve sighed constantly staring at their monitors while modelling their 14th fedora that they were born in the wrong generation. Like Yakuza more than GTA there's no fun-making here but pure grown-up-adolescent style fawning over cool guys with their cool accents and cool cars and cool guns and cool codes and cool ways of doing things.
Video games feel unique in their ability to recreate and invite you to bygone eras. Open world games seem most excited to do this, looking at any assassins creed games. When world building it makes complete sense to eschew the building and just use the work of a thousand historians and enthusiasts to create a wonderful verisimilitude. This was surprisingly what the makers of Mafia wanted to do here. I was wrong about it being a fanboyishness devotion to cool movies, there seems to be a genuine enthusiasm for the culture of the time. The devotion to crafting an atmosphere that stinks of the American 30s. They even decided they wanted the driving to be more accurate than fun to be in line with this recreation of the past. This permeates the entire game with a thick historic haze.
Though this isn’t an educational device, this is a video game. And, man. It's not great. I'm woefully uninitiated with the original but from what I understand it began as a Driver-esque wheelman simulator which explains the what was surprising driving focused intro to the game. An odd choice to set your driving game when cars was bad, it certainly is an interesting one. The driving feels crunchy in that way riding a horse in a modern AAA game feels. I never felt quite in control of these automobiles. They screeched incessantly at my novice driving skills. They drifted without grace across these Chicagoan streets as I fumbled my way through its various driven sections. It's no Ridge Racer.
Now, I have not inspected this seriously but my guess is that the traffic AI does not update depending on the player’s position or I should never learn to drive lest my backlogged account go silent after I cause a magnitudinous pileup 12 minutes into driving a car. Constantly I had cars pulling out in front of me when I was feverishly racing across town to start the next mission. Apparently the original had police that adhere to speeding laws and fuel metres in cars. Which might be interesting to some, but to me smells of horse testicle wrinkles in RDR2.
The infamous Mafia race arrives early in the game. The only thing I’d ever heard about Mafia was the race’s difficulty. It occurred to me as a commitment gate. Where I might’ve thought driving was deemphasized in this Uncrazy Taxi remake the race makes the player wake up and learn how to control these archaic cars. It comes early so you haven't grown tired with their awkward steering and feels good when you win. Though, I imagine if I'd played the original with its reported devastating difficulty this review would’ve been much shorter and been entirely about how bad that race is. The definitive edition race felt perfect in its difficulty and I thank these guys for making it doable for me.
The other half of the game is cover shooting. Wow - across my entire playthrough did I die almost entirely to being bored after hunkering too long behind a crate or an oddly placed piece of furniture. Shooting missions quickly become formulaic as you enter a place either sneaking or not, get to some kind of central location and then fight your way out. Sometimes you get to ignore the first half and you just arrive at a place and start shooting. In these shooting galleries you inch forward after killing 3-5 guys with the same 4 guns each wave until you eventually can duck into a car and drive away from the police. This describes the vast majority of the game. The gameplay is fine. Deeply uninteresting, though I can forgive its early 2000s simplicity. The cutscenes paint the game as a cinematic experience but much of the gameplay feels incredibly arcady and unwatchable.
The third half of the game is its cutscenes. This feels like the part of the game the game-makers were most interested in making. The writing is competent for a video game (about as good as a Netflix original), the dialogue feels refreshingly naturalistic for a video game. The overall plot is satisfying and pulpy. Had I just watched the cutscenes on youtube I’d probably rate it a strong 3 stars on letterboxd. The main character is not interesting enough for a film, all supporting characters though are well realised. When you’re doing the classic Rockstar drive to mission talking bits and you slam your car into a lamp post and you cut Paulie off and he yells at you and then immediately says “where was I?” and then just continues the last line of dialogue. I’ll never understand why it seems such a popular notion to make video games be film. Everything you’ve done to make it cinematic makes it unfun to play and all your gameplay makes it un cinematic. The two don’t mesh and I don't think they ever will. I want to play a mafioso, I don’t want to play an actor pretending to be a mafioso.
The fourth half of the game seems to be collectables. I did not collect anything. The world has been littered with trinkets for you to trufflehog sniff out. These are useless apart from adding gamerscore to your xbox account. Though it certainly is interesting that this open world is empty of distraction apart from these meaningless objects. They exist as an excuse to drive cars around their frankly beautifully designed city that is underserved by the driving and talking connective tissue between missions. It stands as a contrast to the modern distraction filled theme park design of open worlds post-WoW. The open world exists without me and there's something cool about a city constructed whether I wanna hang out in it or not.
The game’s main strength is that it feels made for the people that made it. The enthusiasm for the era seems to be owned by the developers who were allowed to make something they wanted to see and then the publisher asked them gently to please put something in it that could be talked about in the IGN walkthrough. Multiple parts of the game have you searching for things that the publishers would beg to have objective markers but the developers are saying “no look at these things we’ve made”.
The game is no masterpiece, it's a bad game with a serviceable story. But, in video games I don’t think we can ask for better.