Mafia: The Old Country

I went into Mafia: The Old Country half-expecting Hangar 13 to repeat the open-world bloat that weighed down Mafia III. What I got instead was the opposite: a deliberately compact, story-first crime drama that commits hard to its setting and mostly gets away with it. This is a prequel that rewinds the franchise clock all the way to 1900s Sicily, following Enzo Favara from indentured labor in sulfur mines to full membership in the Torrisi crime family. The writing carries genuine weight, the voice cast is strong, and the Unreal Engine 5 presentation makes the Valle Dorata countryside look stunning in motion. On the gameplay side, expectations need calibrating. The core loop is a third-person cover shooter with two secondary pillars: knife combat and period-vehicle traversal. The knife system is the most interesting mechanical addition. Three distinct blade types - the throwable Scannaturi, the one-hit Rasolu, and the durable Stiletto - give close-quarters confrontations some tactical texture, and timed-parry duels add a bit of tension to boss encounters. Guns, by contrast, feel deliberately imprecise: early 1900s firearms are scarce and inaccurate by design, so every lupara shotgun or period revolver shot carries real resource weight. Stealth is available for most encounters and uses a simple distraction-and-choke system with predictable AI patrols, which works but never surprises. Horse and automobile travel round out the loop, and the vehicle handling - weighted, deliberate, sensitive to corners - is the best it has felt in the series. The problems are real and worth naming. The open world exists mostly as decoration. A Free Ride mode was added post-launch as a separate update, but during the main campaign the map is essentially a corridor with prettier walls. Combat animation feels stiff, enemy AI is easy to manipulate, and a handful of boss fights land flat. The PC version also shipped with noticeable stutter when transitioning in and out of cutscenes, though performance during actual gameplay holds up better. At around 12-14 hours of runtime with over three hours of those being cutscenes, some players will feel they are watching more than playing. Franchise veterans who want the mechanical depth of Mafia II or the urban scale of earlier entries may bounce off the lean scope. What the game does exceptionally well is atmosphere. The recreation of early 1900s Sicily is meticulous - dusty town squares, sulfur mine exteriors, sun-baked countryside roads, and an optional Sicilian language dub that was added after player feedback pushed for authenticity. The New York Times named it among the top games of 2025 and called it "an intimate crime drama with a tightly paced narrative," which is probably the fairest capsule summary available. It is not trying to compete with open-world epics. It is trying to be a mob movie you can play. On those narrower terms, it largely succeeds. A story expansion, Man of Honor, introducing Don Salieri from the original game is scheduled for August 2026, so there is more content coming for those who want to stay in the world.

Alex · Scout Team

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