I hate to start a review with a cliché, but reader, I’m doing it. Mafia: The Old Country is that occasional sort of experience that is ‘more than the sum of its parts’. On paper, I don’t think I should like this game as much as I do. When I stop and think about it – y’know, squinting a little with concentration – I actually think I really like it a little less. But on balance, in my heart, I greatly enjoyed the whirlwind of mob tropes developer Hangar 13 has strung together here.
Mafia: The Old Country reviewDeveloper: Hangar 13Publisher: 2KPlatform: Played on Xbox Series X (and some on PC)Availability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S
That’s your one-paragraph review, but there’s much to unpick here in terms of how I came to these conclusions. The fourth main entry in the Mafia series is fascinating in a variety of ways – some for good, some for ill, all intriguing.
Many of the roads taken have clearly been mapped out quite deliberately to deal with the elephant in the room: length. The Old Country is the latest in a growing category of what I’ll here christen the ‘truncated triple-A’ release. That is to say a game with big-budget ambitions and values, but not dead-set on monopolising your time for 40-plus hours, or forever through some live service component. The Old Country gets in, tells its story, and confidently extracts itself from your brain in well under 15 hours. On the whole, I’d say it is better for it.
I rather liked Mafia 3, the last main entry, but its sprawling open world and labyrinthine storyline of betrayal and revenge in an escalating cycle sure . And it says something about that game, which I greatly enjoyed at the time, that my most prominent memory of it today is that busywork wire-tapping activity you had to do repeatedly. It’s that and the soundtrack, full of blistering 60s classics. The Old Country has neither of these things. Stripped back and simplified, it wants to merely do a handful of things well enough in order to deliver a story that’ll keep you gripped.
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Some of that streamlining is obvious. The slice of Sicily where events take place nods to an open world, but stops short of truly being one. You can drive around here and there at the start of chapters, but there’s no police patrols, no laundry list of side activities, no wires to tap (thank god!). Instead it’s just pretty and characterful, something that serves as a lovely backdrop to bloody affairs. The world is vaguely ‘filmic’ (editor’s note: ) in notion – both in terms of how a pretty, perfectly-framed shot is always around the next bend, and also in how its carefully curated and perfectionist visuals give a vague sense of fakery. The best open worlds strive to feel like ‘living’ places; The Old Country doesn’t go for that at all, and ends up instead feeling more like the best-looking Hollywood backlot in history.