Mafia Old Country tries to impress and fails at bringing the franchise to a new age.

Hangar 13 were bold to switch from an open-world/zoned franchise to a linear adventure game. However, I do not think this played out into their favour. With this setting, 1900s Sicily, this could've been one of the greatest Mafia games to date (side quests, NPC interactions, maybe some poker games, roberries etc), but they limited themselves with the scope, to bring out the best story and action pieces they could create.

While understandably this is a linear adventure game, it does a lot of "handholding", restricting any deviation from a predetermined path, even as simple as stowing a horse somewhere else than what the set place is.

Additionally, while this can be seen as quite a menial issue to some, but for me it is immersion breaking; as the playing character you are able to pick up notes/newspapers/letters and similar of the kind, that are scattered throughout the locations. However, there is no restriction to what kind of notes Enzo is "allowed" to pick up. From a newspaper laying on a bench in the city to a confidential note that he should never be able to read if this was a real scenario. This tiny option, breaks immersion, as there is no punishment for reading something that is not allowed (like in Skyrim or Oblivion where even opening a book that is not for public consumption is considered "stealing", but I digress).

One amazing feature is that they've added Sicilian as a language option, which truly delivers the best intended setting for storytelling.

Performance in object and NPC heavy environments sucks; while I cannot boast with a 5090, but I should expect a 4060ti at least give me more than 15FPS (and this is already with Mafia's built-in UE5 TSR upscaling).

The Prologue lasted around 15 minutes, and then the 1st chapter rolled in, that acted as a tutorial for everything that Mafia Old Country has to offer. At first I thought that the first 5 hours played out more as an interactive point and click adventure; follow this, go here, click this, even following was automated to some degree. However, I quickly realised that the whole game is built this way. I do not enjoy this half-assed interaction, either make everything one long cutscene, and stop giving me false image of control (walking 10 steps from cutscene to cutscene). Or do the opposite and let us enjoy the world you've built by at least letting us walking around locations.

However, this does not mean that the game is horrible, quite the opposite. Hangar 13 truly created a beautiful location, and a good story that only compliments the worldbuilding of this game.

Weapons felt heavy, hard to control, but that's how it should be, perfect. Same can be said with driving; cars are slow, and untrustworthy, which aligns with the cars of the 1900s IRL.

The devs knew that a game with this beautiful of a scenery cannot be ridden with HUDs and overcomplicated UI elements. The screen always has one or two small HUD elements (quest objective, and HP/Ammo/Speedometer). UI is also kept as simple as possible, every menu is straight to the point, with no fancy effects or overcomplicated submenus.

Spoilers:

I will not go into the details about the story, instead I wanted to analyse some of the more intricate game mechanics that could be seen as spoilers.

I think halfway through the game I realised why Hangar 13 decided to go linear this time: they were scared to repeat the same enemy boss hierarchy system that we had in mafia 3. You soon understand that all missions are the same - you sneak your way past to an objective, reach the goal and then are meant to backtrack but now all the enemies are clearly aware of you, switching to an action combat sequence. This happens every single mission, that has sneaking involved, btw. Every couple of chapters you will enter a mission that will finish with a "boss" fight, simply adding another shallow layer of combat. This boss fight is always a knife fight, that has "two stages" (you get him to 50%, get a quick cutscene, and then continue again till 0%). This is what I meant at the beginning with the mafia 3 reference, they thought they were far away from that repetitive "open a new area, kill a boss, and proceed to a new area" system, but even in a linear game they couldn't have added anything else. Granted we do have some races (that are fully scripted for you to win btw, I even waited in the car race, and it just straight up failed the mission, and restarted, up until I won), and some A to B missions, basically traversing from a cutscene to a cutscene and then entering a new chapter.

The story itself is quite satisfying; it is one of the oldest Romeo and Juliet tropes, but the acting, music and the action carries this to a satisfying ending.

This is completely not worth the full price, neither it is worth 50% off. Honestly, for how little Hangar 13 has managed to achieve here, they should've made the price around 15-20$. A truly beautiful game, if you meet the recommended requirements, but with a story that you've heard a million times, especially if you've watched Sopranos.

I think this could be a neat game to try, but it should not be counted as a Mafia game, just because it covers similar topics and has a similar setting. With this in mind I cannot recommend a game, that suffers from its own incapability to be something more than just a shadow of a grandiose idea.