![]() This may sound melodramatic, an attempt to force my own political conscience on the game - but Mafia 3's greatest achievement, I think, is that it creates and sustains a space for such musings. I'm not sure what the game's African-American lead Lincoln Clay made of this - the result, it seems, of a glitch whereby reflections lag a few seconds behind the action - but in that plump, affable spectre I belatedly recognised myself: another in a long line of privileged, complacent white guys, lurking in the background with his hands on the levers and buttons of the world. Availability: Out now on PS4, Xbox One and PCĪnd then there was that time I peered into a prostitute's dressing mirror during a raid on a rival gang's brothel and saw a corpulent, buck-naked white man, trapped like a frozen chicken in a purgatory of PS2-grade pixels.Later, I somehow managed to impale an unconscious bartender on a stool, terrifying an old woman so much that her coffee cup became magically affixed to her hand as she ran for the exit. A few hours into the story, I was driving out of the bayou when the game's shadows went haywire, spinning around objects as though the sun were a police searchlight. I've encountered plenty of minor and major errors in Hangar 13's Mafia 3, a hard-to-love but undeniably ambitious open-world crime sim, set in a thinly disguised remix of 1968 New Orleans. Video game bugs may annoy and amuse, but they can also be strangely revealing. ![]() The city feels like far more than just window dressing this time.As clever and original as it is tedious and broken, Mafia 3 has the makings of a classic, but doesn't go the distance. Go south of the city into the swamp on a boat, and you’ll even seen alligators there, who'll attack you if you go for a swim. ![]() This environment, and how well it’s been brought to life, is by far my favourite part of my hands-on with the game. When the sun sets, it bathes the city in sepia. It’s perhaps a bit contrived, but games so rarely attempt to do any world building like this that it ends up being somewhat effective at making this feel like a real setting. NPCs around the city will chat about current events in the game’s ‘60s timeframe, or New Orleans-focused references. New Bordeaux is a gorgeous-looking backdrop, divided into ten districts (nine you can assign, and a tenth, the bayou). Collectively, this slowly-building set of tools make Mafia 3 feel much more like an open world game than ever before, which it has to, assuming this is far bigger than the last one. That last one makes for some really intense, large-scale battles out in the open world, and I had a couple of shootouts where it was fun to watch them bail me out. Some are simply useful functions-Cassandra grants you a weapon van that’ll turn up and sell you increasingly better guns over the course of the game-but you can also call off the cops in a chase, summon a better vehicle, or, my personal favourite, call some hired goons to instantly help you in a firefight. Lincoln also has underboss-based abilities he can use in combat, which are a lot of fun. Further tweaking of Mafia 3’s shooting can’t hurt in the run-up to release. On a granular note, too, the silenced pistol felt like the reticule was slightly too big for me to know when I was landing a headshot. Your opponents move around a lot during a firefight, which often means they’ll successfully flank you, but it also means they leave themselves a little too open for an easy kill-it could use some tweaking to make these encounters feel challenging (this was on medium difficulty). The gunplay itself is enjoyable, with chunky-feeling weapons and brutal kill animations, even if I’m not totally convinced by the AI yet. This system requires some suspension of disbelief, particularly when combined with Lincoln’s Batman-like ability to see enemies through walls, but I like that it offers you another way to play outside of sitting in cover with a machine gun. Stay out of the enemies’ line of sight for long enough, and they’ll very quickly forget you were there-their ability to search you out is near psychic. I really hope there are more stealth options they haven’t revealed yet, because it pretty quickly became my favourite way to play Mafia 3. What starts as a very simple takedown stealth system in the prologue soon gets a few neat wrinkles when you factor in the noisemaker, silenced weapons and remote explosives-it’s not MGSV in complexity, but it offers a nice breather from firefights. If you want to stealth through Mafia 3, you can do that in the majority of the sections I played. That extends to the ways you can play the game, too.
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