If the Mafia series wasn’t old enough for you, then here comes the latest Mafia entry—Mafia: The Old Country. Abandoning the third game’s open-world structure and returning to the early days of Sicilian mafia criminality, The Old Country places its emphasis on linear storytelling and attaching it to the series’ immersive presentation and visceral third-person shooting. If you’ve followed the trailers you can tell The Old Country looks elegant and luscious as a period piece situated in Sicily during the early years of the twentieth century. Does The Old Country bring the Mafia series to new heights, or is it all show and no go and an offer you can refuse?
Dropped into mines and working hard demanding labour under the harsh instruction of Damiano Bastoni and Don Spadaro—the boss of the Spadaro crime family – Enzo Favara along with his associate Gaetano crawl through the cramped confines of a mine until it explodes, killing Gaetano and leaving Enzo in a desperate state. Enzo meets Don Torrisi, the head of the Torrisi crime family, who saves Enzo from Bastioni’s punishment, and introduces him to Luca, who offers a hand to get him up off the floor. Welcomed into the fold of the Torrisi Crime Family, Enzo works his way up to gain the trust of the Don, while contending with intricate family business and operations.
The story starts slow, but builds up brilliantly, bringing you into The Old Country‘s tale in a methodical and intriguing way that keeps you wanting to play so that you can see what happens next. Sure, there are a few menial tasks early on like carrying boxes of alcohol bottles to the back of a car for example, but the slow build is worth sticking with for the pleasures that gradually happen as you proceed through the story. The 10 or so hours you’ll spend in Mafia: The Old Country, along with all of its 14 chapters are paced excellently to provide you with a thorough sense of progress and ascension, so it was certainly the right move to shift Mafia away from Mafia 3‘s open-world format.
On the subject of acclimation, Mafia: The Old Country introduces its gameplay elements slowly. One of the first aspects you’re introduced to is the one-on-one fighting duels. During The Old Country, you’ll be squaring off in battle with a single enemy carrying a knife, and you need to learn to dodge and parry them, and learn when to strike so that their health bar depletes until it’s empty. They are very repetitive and predictable, and the tutorial is essentially done twice—one against Bastioni, and another against Luca, with the only difference being how you learn to dodge out of the way from attacks you can’t repost. Non-interactive cutscenes tend to break the fights up before you continue chopping chunks out of your opposition—so it all feels rather laborious.
Possibly the worst feature of The Old Country isn’t the stealth itself, but how it has been implemented. Generally, the stealth is bland and old-fashioned, aligning with the game’s title in an unwanted way. Specifically though, you infiltrate several areas throughout the story including a villa, a factory and a forest. You sneak steadily around environments trying to avoid detection, throwing coins and glass bottles to distract guards, and if you’re so inclined you can choke the bologna out of them or gut them with several swift and savage knife-based takedowns. You can even throw knives when the opportunity arises, so that’s cool.
The problem is several stealth sections in the game are forced, meaning if you get caught you’ll need to start from the last checkpoint. Sometimes you are allowed to choose whether you want to proceed stealthily or go in all-guns blazing—but the story dictates whether stealth is optional or forced upon you, which makes stealth seem muddled.
Eventually you’ll be open to all the guns the game has to offer, and they’re a fair bunch including hunting rifles, sawed-off and pump-action shotguns, revolvers and multiple types of knives with particular situational advantages like knives for throwing, knives capable for stealth takedowns and knives with more durability. Grenades are available to flush out enemies, potentially clearing multiple goons as well. While the arsenal is taut and sufficient, there’s nothing special about any of the weapons despite their lethality.
Firefights will be familiar to any Mafia franchise aficionado due to their ruthlessness and demand for deft resource management. Bandages are in limited supply and once you’ve used the ones you have available, you’ll need to search around for more. There’s no automatic health regeneration either, so you need to stay behind cover and pick your shots carefully in order to survive. Unless you’re on the easiest difficulty, you shouldn’t dare run and gun at all because becoming overwhelmed and gunned down is all too easy—so smart play is always the best way forward.
Along the way you’ll be driving a myriad of old-timey vehicles and riding horses to get around. If you visit Pasquale’s store, you can purchase styles for your cars, and by visiting stables you can imbue a sparkle of fashion on your horses through means of customization. While vehicles give you a few adrenaline-fueled story moments to drive fast and race, horses are mainly used for conveyance purposes, though there is a horse race to engage with early on.
The experience of driving cars and riding horses are obviously quite different from each other. Horses have three stamina wheels you can utilize to give you bursts of speed to catch up with competition. With vehicles you can drive without much concern, but if your ride gets damaged you’ll have to get out and manually fix it using a wrench. Driving cars and riding horses to get around is cool, especially seeing as you can admire your surroundings, but if you don’t want to drive/ride between missions, at least there’s a skip function available to you to use at your discretion.
Much in-line with the game’s overall pacing, the missions get more exciting the further you delve into The Old Country. Mine work may begin the game, but by the end you’ve infiltrated a factory and an opera house, witnessed massive fires that send buildings crumbling, and you’ll be admiring Sicily’s gorgeous vineyards time and again. There’s no doubt that The Old Country will impress with how it chooses to entertain and excite you, but don’t expect the whole experience to be this way.
As for collectibles… well there are a lot of them! There are letters, figurines, photo opportunities, fox statues and newspapers to find throughout Sicily, and a lot of them are spread across the map that you can snatch up in Explore Mode, though some can only be obtained during specific missions—meaning you’ll need to repeat those missions if you didn’t collect everything the first time. Some collectibles like the fox statues and figurines may seem superfluous, but the newspapers and letters add depth to The Old Country‘s lore, which is what makes them absorbing to collect.
Explore Mode is quite a peaceful and beautiful way to enjoy The Old Country, but all you can do is buy vehicles, horses and customizations, and retrieve missed collectibles. It would’ve been nice if there were races or extra activities to participate in that make you more invested in The Old Country, but unfortunately the opportunity is missed.
On the presentation front, The Old Country is stellar, and almost immaculate. There is some environmental draw-in here and there, and it would’ve been nice to see some rain because there’s usually a lot of glorious sunshine that you may crave a bit more weather diversity, but there is at least some fog to be found—which is subtle but something that expresses a fission of diversity if nothing else. The soundtrack also impresses, providing you with dramatic and sinister tones and scores that keep reminding you this is a big-business mobster videogame.
Conclusion
If you’re up for a fantastic yarn and gorgeous sights, Mafia: The Old Country is outstanding, meaning you’ll be totally sold by its presentation. The moments, the story and the characters are top-notch, and there’s not much to criticize on that front. However, The Old Country is old-fashioned with forced and bland stealth sections, predictable gunplay, and a lack of newness when it comes to the game’s mechanics—also the knife fights are unexciting and rote. You can have a blast with The Old Country if gameplay isn’t your utmost concern, but if it is, you may need to absolve it of its sins, because while the gunplay is functional and enjoyable enough, it lacks nuance and weapon variety. Altogether, The Old Country is definitely worth taking in, but when gameplay is king, you may feel underwhelmed that it spends more time focusing on its visual and storytelling qualities than it does on crafting a sophisticated playable experience.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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