Mafia III Review

If you go through Mafia III opting to give all of your usurped territory to just one or two of your underbosses, you’ll be in for a battle. I say that because, after being slighted so many times, each of the three is more than willing to go rogue. In doing so, they will opt to attack you and force you into battle. To avoid all of that, I suggest that you hand things out evenly.

Although all of this sounds good on paper, and is reminiscent of another underrated game (The Godfather II), its execution is far from great. While every racket offers a new type of environment to stalk, kill, assassinate and interrogate mob minions in, the objectives are always the same and nothing ever really changes. You’ll simply find yourself tasked with killing or interrogating assigned targets over and over again, all while needing to deal with their protection in order to get to them. Every so often, you’ll find cars to follow to money stashes, garbage trucks to blow up, or something of that ilk, but even then it all boils down to very basic gameplay. Hell, even the side missions are ripe with fetch quest mechanics, making them more of a bore than anything.

The gunplay is solid, and it’s nice that they allow you to call in favours (like a consligliere who will pick come and pick up any money you’re carrying, an arms dealer who’ll supply you anywhere you are, and a dispatch operator who’ll call off the cops or shut down phone lines so that witnesses and enemy scouts can’t call for help), but there’s little in the way of intrigue or creativity here.

You hide behind cover, then pop out to shoot baddies, or stalk them from behind in order to execute some badass-looking takedowns. And, if you really want to, you can enter into fisticuffs by pressing B to hit and Y to counter, ala Batman: Arkham Asylum, but not nearly as polished. It all does the job, but it becomes repetitive very quickly, and you’ll get sick of performing the same takedowns over and over again on dumb mobsters.

Therein lays the main issue with Mafia III, that being how boring it is. As much as I wanted to love this game, I found myself having trouble playing it. Doing the same things over and over again got very boring, and the whole process just became a slog. Of course, it didn’t help that I encountered a ton of glitches during my time with it.

To put it bluntly, Mafia III is a hot technical mess and shouldn’t have been released in the state it’s in. There are countless bugs that not only I, but many others, have encountered – so much so that it’s baffling as to how 2K saw fit to release it instead of delaying it further. For starters, I’ve discovered glitched medicine boxes that wouldn’t open, a door that continually swung a full three hundred and sixty degrees, NPCs who became trapped in the floor, and weird green lines that would appear out of nowhere. Worse than all of that were the many random crashes, as well as the weird lighting system that would sometimes make it tough to progress.

So far, I’ve had six crashes, four of which happened during my last session. The lighting has also always been an issue, with oddly coloured skies, bright (sun?) light that blinds you as you’re driving, and randomly changing environmental lighting that make it seem as if the world’s gods have ADD. I’ve had the lighting change three to four times along one stretch of road, which was quite annoying to say the least.

On the other hand, the soundtrack is stellar, the sound effects are of quality, and the voice acting is very impressive. Every story scene is scripted well, and the actors do a very good job of portraying their unique and challenging characters. What really stands out, though, is the soundtrack, which is easily one of the best that gaming has ever seen. Its lengthy list of amazing classics includes, but is not limited to, Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” the Stones’ “Paint it Black,” CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” and Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild.”

Needless to say, it’s very hard to recommend this game as it is, especially for sixty American dollars or eighty Canadian dollars, pre-tax. You’ll get your money’s worth in hours spent, but quality is another thing entirely. It saddens me to say this, too, because I was expecting something great and wanted to be able to talk about how awesome Mafia III ended up being. However, it just wasn’t in the cards, as a rushed, buggy and all around broken experience is what we were given.

This review is based on the Xbox One version of the game, which we were provided with.