No time to waste: there’s Guitar Heroism to be done, so this article will be relatively short.Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven is a mixture of Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, and Goodfellas. This is a very, very good thing.GameplayWhile the world of Mafia is large and detailed like a GTA game, most of the game focuses around specific, linear missions. You have to drive around the open world in order to access these missions, and the missions always require you to drive from point A to point B on the map before doing what needs to be done, but Mafia is by no means a “sandbox” kind of game. In fact, one of the common criticisms of the game is that there is too much pointless driving: since we’re talking about the Prohibition-era United States, the cars seldom go any faster than 60 miles an hour, and when you take into consideration the fact that every mission requires you to traverse the entire map at least once, a lot of gamers were turned off by the long driving times.
On the other hand, some (meaning me) view the driving times as buildup to the missions themselves. If the game had been COMPLETELY linear, and one mission just followed another with no downtime in between, then the game would get repetitive and boring rather quickly. The need to drive from place to place helps break up the action. The missions themselves consist primarily of shooting and driving. The driving mechanics are reasonably realistic: your car can take a hell of a lot more damage before breaking down than it would in real life, but at the same time the damage system isn’t nearly as over-the-top as a Grand Theft Auto game, where scraping the side of a car results in a door flying off. The shooting mechanics are fun and cinematic: if you’re standing up, hitting fire once only points your gun, instead of immediately firing it. It’s a gameplay conceit that is pretty much pointless for 99% of the situations you’ll face, but there’s one specific moment that really made me say “wow” when I played this game years ago: after an enormous gunfight, everyone lies dead except for one gangster, wounded in the belly, slowly crawling away from you. You walk to his body and stand over him. He continues to crawl away, pathetically. Your arm extends. You pause for a moment. Then you fire four more rounds into his body, and he goes limp.Pointless? Yes. Fun? Very. While the targeting system is fine and the controls are as tight as they need to be, one aspect of the gunplay stands out in my mind: every single character in the game can take—and this is a rough estimate—fifteen thousand bullets before dying. With all the focus on realism everywhere else in the game, I cannot begin to fathom why the developers chose to create such weak guns (the Colt Detective Special, when fired at a torso, will only take off 6 hit points. Every enemy in the game has at least 100.). Conversely, any shotgun whatsoever fired at medium-to-close range is an instakill. Thankfully, patches currently exist that fix this particular problem.
StoryMafia is one of the most story-driven games I’ve ever played. The missions, while they often revolve around gunplay, are truly dictated by the story. In the very first mission, two soldiers from the Salieri crime family force you, at gunpoint, to drive them away from a truckload of pursuing mobsters using your taxi. After you help them escape, the next mission goes on almost as if nothing had happened: you use your taxi to drive regular citizens around the town, getting you used to your surroundings but otherwise leaving you pretty bored. Then, suddenly, you are attacked by some gangsters from the previous night: they’re angry that you saved the Salieri boys, and feel like taking it out on you. Immediately after this cutscene, you have to run, on foot, to Salieri headquarters, while being chased by the two gangsters.Instances such as this are common in the game. Story and gameplay transition into one another very fluidly, and as a result, Mafia ends up feeling more immersive than it really has any right to. You get involved in the story and the characters, and when the game is over, you feel like you just watched a really great gangster epic. Granted, the ending itself might really piss you off (I know I was the first time I played through it), but nonetheless, the whole experience is really damn fulfilling.
Why you probably haven’t played itSmall developer, generic name, and other, bigger games came out at the same time. Same old story. Additionally, the release version of the game had a nearly unbeatable (and, for story progression, mandatory) racing mission that annoyed people who had already bought the game, and distanced people who were on the fence about it. Eventually a patch was made, but it was too late: most gamers had moved on. The console ports were pretty lousy too, selling even worse than the PC version. The game still has a pretty determined modding community, but chances of a sequel are slim. Still, if you’re in the mood for a story-driven 1930’s bulletfest, Mafia is really easy to find on eBay, or in a regular gaming store, sometimes packaged alongside the first Max Payne. At the very least, you can download the demo.
