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Mafia: Definitive Edition - remake of Mafia from Hangar 13

Carrion

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Yes obviously "gameplay" like walking the girl home is part of Mafia's immersion focus, and if that is different then it makes a big impact. However if we're talking cover-based Mafia 2 style shooting versus the original's, then I don't think it matters much.
I'm not talking "gameplay", I'm talking gameplay, like being able to point your gun out of a car window and aim it anywhere you want to.

In the original game the whole point of the briefing scene is that he's frightened and being essentially forced to join, and Frank and Salieri even have a conversation about how "hesitant" he is.
Yeah. In every half-decent story the plot and the characters go hand in hand. Tommy not being cold-blooded enough is central to the story and comes to bite him in the ass hard later on. I don't see how you can change Tommy's character in such a drastic way and keep all the story beats in place without fucking up something in the process.
 

DalekFlay

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I'm not talking "gameplay", I'm talking gameplay, like being able to point your gun out of a car window and aim it anywhere you want to.

My point is the original Mafia wasn't good because of gameplay. If you think the gameplay you're talking about was good in that game, we're coming at it from dramatically different places.
 

Hace El Oso

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All the loudmouth pussy posturing they replaced the quiet lethality with is maybe the most grating change to the story I’ve seen so far. The scene where Tommy runs and hides from the Morello goons in the bar early on is a great example.

It reminds me of this little speech from Goodfellas:
 

Carrion

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My point is the original Mafia wasn't good because of gameplay. If you think the gameplay you're talking about was good in that game, we're coming at it from dramatically different places.
I think I've made my stance clear on this. Mafia has flawed yet occasionally very enjoyable gameplay, and it's the reason I've replayed the first game over and over again yet don't care about the sequel at all.
 

AwesomeButton

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Just watched 45 mins of preview build gameplay.

Game a poop.

Characters' models, animations, voice acting... I was watching and thinking "Look what they've done to my boy".
 

AwesomeButton

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"Game a poop" was the name of a thread about PoE, and I really liked it.

Maybe I'm spoiled by RDR2 but the animations look terribly stiff and the VA sounds both like low sound quality, and very generic italian greaseball.

BTW, my memory is that the intro mission in the original game was set in 1927, and in the remake it is in 1930, after the stock market crash.
 

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It makes sense to be set in the Depression Era, I don't know why I've remembered it so.
 

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Review embargo should be drop on in 10 minutes.
giphy.gif
 

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They're not gonna post themselves, son: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...w-a-generous-remake-that-still-shows-some-age

Mafia: Definitive Edition review - a generous remake that still shows some age
An offer you can probably refuse.

A mostly thorough remake of 2002's original, Mafia: Definitive Edition has its moments - but it struggles by the standards of today.

Wailing jazz on the radio. Sumptuous, glossy cars on the road. Opportunity in Tommy Angelo's eyes. There are times, in Mafia: Definitive Edition, where you might wonder if the Great Depression was really so bad after all. Such is the luxury and imbalance of Hangar 13's remake, a top-to-bottom effort that is at times gorgeous - to look at, to listen to, to be in, occasionally to play - but more often muddy, never quite knowing what it is, or really getting the more dated of Mafia 2002's ideas out of its own way. The result is a compellingly awkward, sort of doubly-effective flashback to another time.

And I could talk forever about that radio. A wondrous device, carrying the weight of this game's world on its back and jabbing at the heart of the decade's contradictions, the carnalism of the '30s that rubbed against the puritannical. Mafia's is a world built on hypocrisy, built through the Weimar-esque bursts of mid-depression creativity that were swing and dancing jazz that blare, between imperious political decrees and preaching reports, from police chiefs, governors, presidents, lecturing on citizens' own responsibility for rising crime. We talk of world-building often, but it's rarely done like this. Rare that you sink into a world solely through its actual, environmental sounds, and again so rare that it's through these sounds, the crooners over the car's speakers and arooogas of their horns. Even then, you hear swing and jazz in a video game and think 'apocalypse', dead worlds and rotten cultures, thanks to Fallout or Bioshock or the like. Mafia's sounds give life.

But just as Mafia: Definitive Edition can sing at the right moment, you can also catch it rather flat, with technical snags and ageing tendencies dragging you out of the world. Much has been made of the new views you can drink in, thanks to the game's more "varied topography", as publisher 2K puts it, but at distance detail can be poor and skylines washed out. This extends beyond the environment, with faces stunningly drawn and animated in Mafia's many cutscenes, then often plasticky-smooth and dated as you walk about town.

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In cutscenes, faces are luxuriously rendered and intricately animated. In the playable world? Forget about it.

Performance, too, putting my amateur Digital Foundry hat on for just a moment (they'll be along with a much more sophisticated analysis than mine soon, fear not), is also a little wobbly, the issue not the frame rate but some other kind of relentless stutter, as though the world itself is struggling to load in as you pass through it at any kind of speed. It means driving - when you're not sitting, listening, drinking-in - can be a nightmare, especially on anything below the recommended specs, as consistent, fraction-of-a-second freezes and hiccups make it hard to really nail a turn (on a PC a shade under those specs the game crashed, twice, on opening, and driving was impossible; on a slightly more powerful one the troubles reduced to bearable, if you don't mind a perpetual headache).

That can, also, be down to the mechanics of driving too, which could've done with more work. Driving is utterly central to Mafia: Definitive Edition, as it was with the original. You are Tommy Angelo after all, cabby-turned-mobster-wheelman, caught up in all that allure of depression-era crime, and for all the shooting and wisecracking of mob life you drive your way through this game, fundamentally - even if you turn on the option to skip the unnecessary trips - and if driving is a dirge then consequently so is much of Mafia itself.

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Cars are wonderful to look at - and to drive, so long as you go in a perfectly straight line and aren't rubber-banded in a mission.
Gear changes, part of the original Mafia's drive for authenticity, are set to automatic by default in Definitive Edition, and I daren't try them manually. The '30s cars, gorgeous as they may be, handle like blimps, wafting and floating around Lost Heaven's right-angle turns, or more often simply not. People who don't care about the concept of fun will note that fine-handling Chrysler Phaetons wouldn't be realistic, although neither are the largely scripted-feeling chase sequences of Mafia's missions, where your motorcycle - a new addition for the remake, which I recommend using where possible - can't gain any ground on a much slower enemy you're asked to chase. Nor is the lack of a handbrake for gambling round corners at speed; nor the occasional, murderously hard edges that jutt imperceptibly from the environment (a 2000s throwback I haven't missed). Nor, above all, the inclusion of a 'ram' button, which gives you a miniscule burst of acceleration and a strange, split-second moment of impossibly over-responsive handling. It's useless most of the time but as a workaround I often found myself mashing the ram button as I cornered, tweaking the car into near perpendicularity for half of a turn and bouncing off the walls for the rest. Not great.

Shooting, the other half of Mafia that isn't one of its cutscenes, is frustratingly similar in its wafty handling, the reticule having an awkward stickiness and most guns a general vagueness that meant I most often opted for the basic revolver. That's an especial shame as other parts of the combat can be great: enemy AI, for instance, is actually quite impressive, often flanking or closing the gap with shotguns, which coupled with destructible environments stops you from sinking into traditional whack-a-mole, cover shooter mentality and forces you to move and improvise, in a manner close to the dynamism of Gears of War. It's also enjoyably understated, keeping enemies to (mostly) believable numbers and refraining from bullet sponges or majorly excessive set pieces that might feel out of step with the time.

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Action is well-pitched, with strong AI. But pacing is all over the place thanks to the constant driving and cutscene interruptions, while aiming feels sticky and wooden.

The other side to this is that missions can feel a tad flat. In part it's due to their linearity, their closed-endedness mirroring the wider game itself. Mafia, the original and the Definitive Edition, is effectively a linear third-person shooter with optional driving and a separate, missionless Free Ride mode. Each mission of the story flows immediately from one to the next, a closed loop inside an open world, and so to explore the temptation of the city at large you need to quit back out to the menu - it's a legacy of the game's age, which you probably can't, reasonably, expect Hangar 13 to have changed within the scope of the remake. But it's still a shame.

It's also because, in the time since, other games have come along and done it better. In one mission, for instance, you'll need to don a disguise - a fetching sailor's uniform, no less - and carry out an assassination on an old steam-powered paddleboat. It's a marvelous, period-perfect setting, with fireworks and tension and some nice views of the city. But it immediately evokes the thought of Hitman, or even GTA 5, games next to which Mafia suffers thanks to its lack of pageantry and more traditionally linear, rigid mission design.

The story, too, just doesn't quite get going. It's another case of video games doing narrative in reverse, starting with the genre and working backwards to a story - which again is largely a sign of the times in which the original Mafia was written, but enough has been re-written in the Definitive Edition for it to have made some real improvements. Instead, Mafia: Definitive Edition starts with the trappings of other mob stories, taking note of everything you'd expect in a traditional gangster flick: opportunity, greed, betrayal, someone saying "we're going to the mattresses", someone objecting to dealing drugs, the skinny numbers guy, a doting wife, a nice Italian restaurant getting shot up. This is done in order to seem like a gangster flick, to make you play it and go "wow, just like the movies" - but also serves as a sort of admission that it'll never actually be one, never one that other stories want to emulate.

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Mafia is far from the only game that struggles with authenticity. It has moments, especially in the game's latter half, and the occasional dodgy accent aside the performances are excellent. But it still feels like a montage of other stories' beats.

The result is beautifully rendered cutscenes, enjoyable beats and some fairly likeable characters (Angelo excluded, with his personality reduced to the most stereotypical of male video game protagonists - quiet, alpha, emotionally repressed, stern - although perhaps that's just a sign of how well male protagonists tend to line up with the ideal men of the '30s). But all of it arranged with overfamiliarity, the game becoming a kind of theme restaurant, the hair and makeup flashback episode of a serial TV show. The original story's high point, its ending, has also been tinkered with itself. I won't spoil it but speaking generally, Mafia's denouement has gone from Scorsese-esque parable - another borrowed beat, but a brilliant one at least - to something I read as muddled, and oddly smug.

The wider result, then, is one of wasted opportunity, a cardinal sin in '30s USA - the land of it, lest we forget. There are good moments in Mafia: Definitive Edition, some good times and some fond memories - I stand by my love of the radio, the rain patter, the cars, when you're not driving them - but the rest is at best nostalgia, which only goes so far.

https://www.pcgamer.com/mafia-definitive-edition-review/

MAFIA: DEFINITIVE EDITION REVIEW
Relive the rise and fall of Tommy Angelo.

Welcome to the 1930s. The economy has collapsed, authoritarian regimes are gaining power around the world, dust storms are killing crops and causing food shortages, and to make matters much, much worse, booze has been declared illegal. But for Tommy Angelo, a cab driver in the city of Lost Heaven, the Dirty Thirties are an age of opportunity. This is the story of his rise from working stiff to mafioso.

But before you dive fedora-first into the criminal underworld, you have to spend some time earning an honest living. One of the first missions in Mafia sees you driving a creaky jalopy of a taxi cab, picking up snotty passengers, and getting a feel for the city as you go. The Mafia series has always been great at slowing down and giving you a chance to immerse yourself in its evocative world, and this glitzy remake of the 2002 original is no different.

Naturally, this doesn't last long. After a fateful encounter with a couple of wiseguys, Tommy ditches his cab for good and joins the Salieri crime family. The jobs are simple at first. Squeezing protection money out of local business owners, driving people around town. But thanks to a vibrantly paced story, it's not long before you get to indulge in car chases, shootouts, robberies, and all the other jolly activities of a hard-working mobster.

Mafia features a big, explorable city, but it's not an open world game. This is a completely linear experience, split into tightly designed missions, so don't go in expecting a GTA-style playground. It's a cover shooter, really, interspersed with long drives and slower moments of scene-setting to let you soak up the atmosphere before the bullets inevitably start flying.

It gets the balance right. You rarely feel overloaded with combat, with plenty of breaks in between to wander around, talk to people, or take a drive. The shooting is chunky and satisfying (the shotguns are great), if ultimately pretty basic. But sluggish character movement makes sprinting between, and snapping to, pieces of cover—especially in narrow corridors—feel clumsier than it should.

It is, honestly, a deeply average, old-fashioned shooter. But through its use of set-pieces, world-building, and storytelling, I was often having too much fun to care. One mission in particular, which takes place at night during an apocalyptic thunderstorm, is brilliantly crafted, thrillingly tense, and hugely atmospheric. It's still just driving and shooting, but the way it's packaged is magnificent.

It's all smoke and mirrors, of course. But when it's this entertaining, I don't mind being fooled. Make peace with the fact that Mafia is a heavily scripted, totally linear, story-led shooter and you can just sit back and enjoy the ride. The story isn't as good as Mafia II's, which remains the series' peak, but the tale of Tommy Angelo's criminal rise is well told, if a little cutscene heavy.

But it's worth remembering that the bones of Mafia: Definitive Edition are almost 20 years old. The game has been rebuilt with new technology, it has more forgiving checkpoints, and has been streamlined and tweaked in a number of ways—including wider roads in the city. But deep down it's the same game and sticks closely to its cult source material, especially in how the missions are structured and paced.

Of course, it looks a whole lot better. Lost Heaven is a little emptier than some modern videogame cities, but it's occasionally incredible to look at—especially at night when it's raining. The period accurate signage, fashion, and vehicles do a good job of making you feel like you've stepped back in time, in addition to a nice selection of old timey music on the radio. The sense of place it creates is superb throughout.

And if you really want to get lost in the setting, you can set it so that driving over the speed limit, running red lights, or bumping into other cars will get you in trouble with the cops. They'll give chase and hand you a ticket if they manage to catch you. This adds a nice layer of simulation to the city, but you can disable it if you'd rather just gun it to the next location without worrying about the law bothering you.

This, along with a range of difficulty options including a punishing 'classic' mode for anyone who finds the remake too easy, makes for a nicely customisable game. There's also a free roam mode that lets you explore the city without being tied to a mission, fun collectables in the form of old pulp magazine covers, and a car encyclopedia where you can test drive unlocked vehicles.

Whether you're well acquainted with Mafia or a newcomer, this is a solid remake that's worth playing. The new tech doesn't quite hide the fact that it's a game built on 18-year-old foundations, but it's a fun, pacey, and nicely presented gangster epic with great set-pieces and a rich setting. There are better shooters out there, but Mafia dresses its action up with style.

THE VERDICT
79

MAFIA
A decent, if unremarkable, cover shooter, elevated by artful scene-setting and memorable set-pieces.
 

AwesomeButton

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Weimar-esque bursts of mid-depression creativity

:prosper:

The Weimar period, whatever cultural influence it could have had on the US, was very much over by the beginning of the game's timeframe. Another journo trying to pass for an intellectual.
 

AwesomeButton

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you hear swing and jazz in a video game and think 'apocalypse', dead worlds and rotten cultures, thanks to Fallout or Bioshock or the like
No that's not thanks to those games, but thanks to being a retard who hasn't played Grim Fandango. :lol:
 

cvv

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It is, honestly, a deeply average, old-fashioned shooter.

It's all smoke and mirrors, of course. But when it's this entertaining, I don't mind being fooled. Make peace with the fact that Mafia is a heavily scripted, totally linear, story-led shooter and you can just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Nobody ever said this about TLoU2. That game got 10/10s wall to wall even tho the same could be said - average and old-fashioned formula packaged in a ton of produkshun values so you don't notice how obsolete the gameplay is.
 

Lemming42

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Just watched the entire game since full playthroughs are already up on YouTube. Credit to all the actors for giving good performances, but the story really is just weaker than the original. The only real improvement is Sarah, who had absolutely no presence in the original and now gets a few effective cutscenes with Tommy over the course of the game, and is a much better character now. There's also a few fun details/changes like Salvatore from Visiting Rich People not being able to speak English.

Some of the changes to mission design are just insane. Like in Better Get Used To It, the simple fight against the gang of punks in the alleyway is now a fucking ten minute shootout during which a telegraph pole collapses and a warehouse explodes into flames, and instead of a mere gang there's now an army of tommygun wielding punks. Madness. Happy Birthday! is another stupid one - it's mostly the same up until the assasination, after which there's a mandatory mega-shootout across the entire boat (originally you could just run straight to the escape boat). It's pretty clear that they realised the overly-slick new combat mechanics wouldn't map well onto the more low-stakes, plausibly realistic shootouts of the original game, so now there's a bunch of inane shit in every other mission. The Priest is another one that's been changed for the worse, you have to chase a guy around the fucking church like an idiot while like 50 people show up to shoot at you.

The biggest problem is Tommy. The actor does as good a performance as anyone could have, but the writing just makes him a worse character than the original Tommy in just about every way. His disillusionment with the mafia is really half-assed, and he inexplicably gets a bunch of new psychotic moments (like burning someone alive) which make him much harder to relate to in any way. He's just an asshole at the start of the game and an asshole at the end of the game.
 

AwesomeButton

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Even the game's "plausible realistic shootouts" were way too big to be either plausible or realistic. I've been discussing Mafia back then and Mafia now with some friends yesterday, and I reached the conclusion that the best remake for Mafia as a game, not as a series of cutscenes and shooting galleries, would have been turning it into a Hitman game, in the 1930s setting. Not open world, still mission-to-mission gameplay, yet having the capacity to be low-key, or more action.
 

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