Mafia III (PS4, 2016)
The defining characteristic I've noticed of 8th gen open world sandboxes has been size. Gratuitous size. Huge maps with little meaningful detail and even less meaningful content, usually the same basic task repeated over and over with uneventful journeys from one to the next. Maybe there's some other things dotted around to try and break up the monotony but for the most part, they're timesinks. And not even enjoyable ones.
And so 2016 brought us Mafia III, a somewhat misleading title as it has little to do with Mafia I or Mafia II. I wonder what people who make games or films or things in franchises think when they make a numbered game that has scant connection to the previous instalments. You play as Lincoln Clay, a fittingly unsubtle name for a black Vietnam veteran who makes his way through New Bordeaux's organised crime hierarchy on a mission of what the box describes as "military-grade revenge." Lincoln was betrayed by the local Mafia boss, Sal Marcano, and the game sees you take down Marcano's empire to get him back.
The start of the game is quite confusing. It switches between Lincoln on the job where he's betrayed, Lincoln when he's just arrived back home and documentary-style flashbacks from the 'present' from characters describing the events of the game. It takes around two hours to get through these set-ups and then you're fired into tutorial versions of the main missions that make up the bulk of the game while some new characters are introduced. By the time you have genuine open-world freedom your probably around five hours in. This made the game very hard to get into, and even beyond that I felt somewhat overwhelmed. It doesn't help either than the menus and objective tracker are overly-stylised and difficult to follow. Side-missions will show up in your objective list even if you haven't technically unlocked them yet. Why?
The convoluted menus are ironic, because the game is very light on variety. Lincoln is a prospective crime boss, and those tutorial missions start with you assembling a crew of three lieutenants to assign criminal rackets and the city's districts to for them to run. This involves you going to your bff and rogue CIA agent Donovan who seemingly has the entire city bugged. He tells you who to talk to to start taking down a racket. You talk to them. You then find a snitch, destroy some merchandise or kill some people. Then the head of the racket pops up and you take him out like a demented whack-a-mole game.
Once you've taken down the rackets, the lieutenant of the district pops up. You take them out, and assign the district to one of your bosses, with various benefits for each and an arbitrary and pointless attempt at conflict if you don't distribute them evenly. As I type this, I realise it makes the Mafia seem like a giant pyramid scheme. The problem with this format is it makes the game even more repetitive than it initially seems. There's little meaningful difference between killing a racket boss or a district boss, and none of them really exist as antagonists. They only ever appear so you can kill them, so with one or two exceptions we only ever really have Lincoln's word that there's an ultimate enemy he's trying to kill.
The process of taking over rackets and districts has its benefits and drawbacks. I played the game twice to get all the trophies, because there's one for killing all the racket bosses and one for saving them. Great stuff there. It's even meaningless in-game, aside from some extra cash from the operation you have no involvement with a racket when you've taken it over. On my first playthrough I got really involved in the process of taking down enemies. I went in with just a silenced pistol most of the time, staking a location out, hiding, drawing people to me one by one. On a few occasions I even managed to get to the boss without a single enemy seeing me. This was fantastically satisfying, and although I rarely used the game's full weapon potential, the gameplay itself was mechanically very sound, which led to the satisfaction.
Then came the second playthrough, where I realised enemies were completely oblivious to pretty much anything and you could still kill them all silently even while running straight up to them for the knife to the throat move rather than sneaking around. That, and the realisation that the game was basically the exact same thing over and over for 15-20 hours, got quite old quite quickly. I was playing on the easiest of the three difficulty settings, but to be honest I don't know why it has difficulty settings. Given the ease with which you can be overwhelmed by multiple enemies who know you're there shooting at you, I don't want to know what medium or hard are like.
I'd be doing the game a disservice if I downplayed how fun the combat is though. In full-on combat, even with cover, it's not great. Even on easy you seem to take lots of damage, and there's a delay in using your health packs meaning you can be overwhelmed quickly. The guns you have access to early in the game also seem quite weak, with high rates of fire and poor damage, meaning long reload times where you end up even more exposed. Thankfully, throwable weapons are great. There's grenades, molotovs, noisemakers, proximity mines and if you have the DLC, throwing knives. Strategic deployment of these can clear an area of enemies quickly without them knowing you were there. Similarly, grabbing someone as they pass by your cover and performing a brutal takedown with Lincoln jamming a knife through their throat never gets dull.
I've gone back and forth on my opinion of the story. Aside from the confusing start and the repetitive nature of reaching the game's conclusion, the pacing and the flash-forward style of storytelling can make some moments lose their emotional resonance. I like Lincoln as a character. The writing and the voice acting for most of the characters in fact is really strong. They're earnest and human. Being set in 1968 in a fictionalised version of New Orleans and featuring a black protagonist, race is a prominent aspect of the world and the story. The game opens with a disclaimer that lots of people of different backgrounds all worked on the game and they had to include the racism because that's what the world was like. Well, yes. It'd be more jarring if you made this game without the n-bomb being thrown around like confetti. But, why do you include as one of Lincoln's mates a perpetually drunken Irishman who sends car parts to the IRA so they can commit terrorist bombings? Why is there a prominent Haitian community in one area of the game who practice voodoo and speak in patois? The game's most thoughtful moments all occur in cutscenes, and the world outside of those undermines it a lot.
I have to put in an aside here. After the game's conclusion - which features a choice which I initially approached with genuine concern, picking what's ultimately the least bad option (I think) - it features one final cutscene. One of the documentary aspects has featured Lincoln's CIA friend Donovan at a US Senate inquiry about what happened in the city. After going through all the events of the game Donovan pulls out a gun and shoots the guy heading it, claiming he was paid by Marcano to assassinate President Kennedy. It was so ridiculous, so unexpected and so f***ing stupid I burst out laughing, completely forgetting what I'd seen and heard just before then. The game struggles to balance the persecuted, thoughtful young black man Lincoln Clay (and the wider black community across the country) and the perma-raging, hellbent on revenge and destruction Lincoln who's functionally a cross between Rambo and the Terminator. Even the final confrontation with Marcano suffers from this, with a nice thoughtful cutscene followed by a hideous and incongruous death once the player has control again.
When I mentioned earlier that there's nothing in the game besides taking down rackets, I was right. The world is empty. Almost eerily empty. I had the map that came with the game on my wall to start with because I would struggle to get my bearings, but I quickly realised it was pointless because there was no need to know anywhere. I've spent a couple of weeks playing this game and I can't tell you a thing about the street layouts. There aren't any buildings to interact with. No activities outside of missions and some token races. Building facades are dull and lifeless. Pedestrians seem eager to throw themselves in front of your car even if you're nowhere near them as you drive. Tram and train lines lie empty, unused throughout the city. Half of the game's map by size is taken up by back roads in a large bayou area, but nothing happens here. You have the occasional fetch quest for a racket where you drive in and back out. It almost feels as if the game's unfinished, as if more was intended for the map but was never realised.
Just to add to that, there are collectibles dotted around that don't achieve anything. Sticking famous albums from the 60s for us to find, or Playboy magazines from the time (to be fair, you get full magazine scans, articles, naked women, the lot) around randomly doesn't add depth. Taking down one of the lieutenants you have to infiltrate a boxing hall, why not include that as an activity? Grand Theft Auto games have been around for a while, it's easier to rip them off than this. The pedestrians and the random news updates on the in-car radio don't help make the world any less sterile. It's a bit like the Truman Show, with people randomly blurting out historically relevant references to try and make the world feel real. It doesn't work.
The map isn't much fun to drive around in either. I was reminded of LA Noire's driving physics, where it feels like an old FIFA or NHL game before you could control your players in 360 degrees. Then there's the hilarious 'damage' models of cars, where you can drive into a wall at 100mph and slightly dent the bonnet of the car on one side. This game took up 66GB on my hard drive and I honestly struggle to think where it all went.
Speaking of the size, this game has bugs everywhere. My favourite was when I was driving a car I'd used in a side-mission. Once the mission was over I was still driving the car, and once I'd gone far enough away from the starting point the car disappeared, leaving me in the middle of the road firing my gun because that's the same button as the throttle, so someone ran to phone the police. I've also never heard my PS4 as loud as it was during this game. Pre-rendered cutscenes are fine, everything else and I can still hear it even with noise cancelling headphones on.
There are three DLC add-ons for Mafia III, and they address my biggest complaints to some extent. Faster, Baby! sees you in a new area of the map in an even more racist county taking down a corrupt police Sheriff. Stones Unturned sees you do some James Bond Cold War fantasy bullshit thing with Donovan stopping a rogue agent from stealing missiles for the Soviets. Sign of the Times sees Lincoln take down a weird cult that disappears as quickly as it's introduced, before you can restore the bar that was destroyed when he was betrayed by Marcano at the start of the game. There is some variety here and each episode is fairly substantial in terms of length, so I can't criticise them too much.
As I look through what I've written about this game, I realise it's a game of contrasts. That might seem a bit heavy-handed given its prominent racial themes, but for the good points, there's bad. On first playthrough, good gameplay. On second, painfully dull. For good characterisation and performances, a story which undermines it with occasional veering into the ridiculous. For good and varied gameplay mechanics, very little do to express that variation. For a decent soundtrack and care to make the game accurate to the period, a near completely sterile world to experience it in. I suppose it's down to the individual to decide whether it's a good game with bad aspects, or a bad game with good aspects.
While I was glad to finally see the back of this, Mafia III had its moments. Moments where I enjoyed what I was doing. Moments I was immensely satisfied by what I was doing. Any game where you can throw petrol bombs at a KKK rally is undeniably good. Moments where I saw real humanity being portrayed, and felt contemplative about what was happening as a result. The problem is these moments generally popped up in between a sea of forgettable drudgery.
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