Mafia review

Mafia is a mission based driving game with some on-foot sequences in the style of the Grand Theft Auto series. The game casts you as a taxi driver in Lost Haven (New York and New Jersey) during the 1930s depression. When you help some mafia guys get away from a chasing gang you get recruited as a permanent driver for the Salieri family. From here you get roped into performing other duties including money collection and dishing out beatings alongside your driving duties.

I’m waiting

The first and most noticeable thing about Mafia is the loading times. This is a game that has a decently sized city available but it’s in two sections. Not only does it take a couple of minutes to load each mission, but as you drive between sections of the city you have to wait a couple of minutes for the next section to load. This completely destroys the flow of the game. Every time I got into a mission I’d have to drive between sections and get completely frustrated. The first time this will be a major problem is in the early taxi driving mission. Before you take a job with the mob you drive around as a cabbie for a while. This level has you driving back and forth between the sections and dreading when the fare gets in and tells you that he wants to go across the bridge. The next worst culprit is a level where you drive a race car across the bridge between sections at speed. You start the level on one side and after sitting through the loading of the next section for a couple of minutes, after just twenty seconds of driving, it’s all to easy to destroy the car in the traffic on the other side. This then subjects you to a couple of minutes loading to get back to the start of the mission and so on. If nothing else it teaches you to control the car on that second section.

I cannot change the laws of physics

Mafia is primarily a driving game, which would be fine if driving was fun. The cars try to accurately reflect the cars of the time, which is all well and good but they don’t accelerate, they don’t break and they don’t corner. That may be what driving was like in the 1930s but it just isn’t all that much fun in a video game. To its credit though, the variety of cars available is good and they do all feel different. As you progress through the game you get hold of some better cars which are more fun to drive but it’s still a bit disappointing. The game allows you to get out of the car and steal other cars whether or not they’re being driven by someone else. This obviously draws from the likes of GTA and is handled well. If you’re on foot then you also have the option of jumping on the train. The traffic is also fairly well handled. Other cars drive around freely giving the city a realistic feel, although they do manage to drive pretty stupidly getting out of the way into oncoming traffic or driving into buildings just because you hit your horn. The oncoming traffic also tends to just flash their lights and beep their horn at you if you’re in their lane rather than attempt to get out of the way or stop.

Foggy

The graphics are the part that shows the history of this game. Originally developed for the PC over two years ago the Xbox version is just a straight port. The graphics have a shockingly short draw distance with lots of fogging to try and hide this. Still, buildings and trees just appear in the mid distance. Edges aren’t sharp, suffering substantially with jaggies. The frame rate suffers too easily as well. The frame rate is generally pretty fluid but crash with more than two cars and the frame rate gets noticeably slow. It shouldn’t be this easy to affect the frame rate on an Xbox game. The other factor showing this game’s age is the soundtrack. With none of the niceties that we’ve come to expect from modern Xbox games like custom soundtracks and in-game Surround Sound it feels like the developers are short changing you on the presentation of Mafia.

Story boarding

A lot of time seems to have been spent on the story and the cut scenes. The voice acting is pretty good for a video game, not excellent but pretty good. The story is quite involving as you follow your character’s career through the mafia family. The cut scenes are quite lavish with good camera work and animation. Whilst the cut scenes are well produced they are rather lengthy. This poses a problem that if you skip the scenes because you want to get on with the game you miss out on the point of the mission you’re undertaking. I think it could be improved with having shorter scenes, possibly more frequently during missions. This might also have helped to cut the loading times as each scene would be quicker and easier to get into memory.

Missing a trick

What Mafia for the Xbox boils down to is a poor man’s GTA. If you’ve finished GTA and True Crime then maybe Mafia will be for you. I would rate it much higher if it wasn’t for the rather soul-destroying mid mission loading times. The game has the potential to be rather engrossing with its story although the driving can be rather tedious due to the realistic nature of the cars. The missions are varied and interesting and there are a few different game modes to keep you interested. These are a free drive around the city picking up fares in your cab and a race mode where you race in the normal cars within the city. This does help with the longevity of the title but with no multiplayer option for these game types they’re ultimately limited in their interest, although they do help you get to know your way around.

All in all, Mafia misses a trick. By just porting the PC version straight to the Xbox the developers have thrown the title in amongst the much more polished likes of GTA and True Crime. Mafia looks, sounds and feels dated on the Xbox, maybe because we’ve been spoilt and we know what the machine is capable of this just doesn’t satisfy.