Mafia III Review

Ever since watching the first gameplay trailer of Mafia III, I had the feeling that the game would feel more like GTA than a Mafia game. After playing and finishing the game twice, I realised that unfortunately my concerns had merit. There are a lot of things I don’t like about Mafia III but there are also very little things I truly enjoyed. But before I get into it, I should mention that there are mutually exclusive achievements. So if you are an achievement hunter, in order to get 100% on Mafia III you have to play the game twice, almost fully too. Fortunately difficulty doesn’t affect achievements unlike Mafia II ;)

NEGATIVES

I hated that the police have “shoot to kill” policy for even the most little things like ramming into a stop sign. But they are also way too loose regarding traffic rules. If you drive with 120+ kmph noone will care…

I truly and TRULY hated how repetitive the game is. You have 9 districts to capture and to flush out the district boss you need to get rid of its rackets first. All districts have different rackets but they all require the same actions. In order to drive out racket bosses you need to damage their profits. First district requires you to do 2000 dollars of damage while for later rackets it can go as high as 90.000. There are many things you can do to inflict damage. You can kill enforcers, destroy supplies, steal their money and so on. Doing this over and over again for 18 rackets across 9 district was repetitive as hell.

From my personal experience Shadwen was the game that had the most stupid AI. I can safely say that Mafia III is definitely the new champion in that department :D Even guards in Aragami raised the alarm if you whistled more than once, in Mafia III only one guard at a time will follow you wherever you go and not ask for help as long as you whistle :D There is an enemy called Sentry. Sentries are the only enemies that call in for reinforcements if they detect you. I don’t really understand why regular enemies don’t do that.

POSITIVES

STEALTH!!! AI is absolutely stupid but there is still a stealth option which I’ll welcome no matter what. You can stealth the entire rackets. You can even do it in a pacifist way if you want as you have the option to flip racket bosses instead of killing them. You can avoid killing Enforcers by doing other types of damage to keep your pacifist run intact.

Sit-downs are fantastic. Everytime you capture a district you will sit down with your underbosses to decide who gets control of the district. Depending on your actions on top of your previous decisions underbosses will react differently to your choices. My most favourite moments from the game came from these district negotiations. I loved how those underbosses fought like little children, throwing funny insults at each other :D

Our beloved Vito is back :)

I enjoyed the story. It wasn’t as strong as previous games in my opinion but it was one of the strongest features in this game. From voice acting to character facial expressions everything is captured beautifully. Documentary type of storytelling was interesting to witness but in the end it is nothing more than a “revenge flick” for me rather than a Mafia story.

Mafia III has 3 different endings. One of these endings can have 3 different alternatives depending on your choices regarding district distribution to your underbosses. I’m a sucker for having different endings so I loved this one. There is also a fantastic surprise after you deal with the final boss :D Make sure not to spoil yourselves for it to have the maximum shock effect ;)