During the release of the original Mafia, big, open 3D worlds in games were not common. Fourteen years ago GTA has only made a key transition in 3D, and Mafia positioned itself as a well-accepted alternative for a realistic approach and serious stories. Today the Mafia is in a difficult situation because the GTA stepped away from any competition, a genre of games with open world, so-called, sandbox title, is on the verge of saturation, because almost every third game is sold as open world with freedom of movement in three-dimensional environment.
To highlight among a bunch of games of the same mold, Mafia 3 had to preserve the identity of their series, but at the same time to catch up with the trends of “open world”. The second part was not allowed to happen again because of the sales aspect, because the audience does not want to just play in the open world, but also a bunch of new content and the possibility of fooling around in it. This had left drastic consequences on the Mafia 3 which have had regressed the whole series.
It is about one big package with a bunch of missions. Unfortunately, the main package of the mission is terribly monotonous. The structure is such that the main missions are always locked, and to unlock them you have to harm damage in every part of town to particular boss just to be able to confront him. Harming is always the same and the only thing that changes is the locations where you steal money, destroy property and eliminate key targets. Repetition is especially irritating when the location in the district began to repeat itself, so for example, last mission is on the same place where you’ve done previous mission.
Secondary missions are sometimes more imaginative, but personally, they weren’t interesting because of poor connections with the main story. The only reason for carrying out these missions is to unlock additional weapon that is not commercially available. However, an interesting concept is that you cannot see all the side missions in one transition, since they usually depend on your relationship with one of the three mafia bosses which you can assign the conquered parts of the city. If you are not allergic to repetitive main campaign, then it is worth mentioning that Mafia 3 has some replay value. Not particularly big, but unlike the second title, there are several different endings based on several different factors.
I believe that the bugs and lapses will be fixed in time, but what you cannot fix is the very structure of the game, which is in many cases a significant minus. It’s not response to poorly open world of the Mafia 2. It’s more likely that this is a tribute to the first project development team Hangar 13. Given that the appetite for the game was huge, the final product actually turned out quite good. Although it has the half-quality, at least it has some quality. The question is, are you ready to accept that this quality belongs to the story, not the gameplay.
