The world of mafia is an interesting world that is greatly admired by movie lovers, especially the Italian Mafia, but despite the great admiration for these films and these stories in general, they did not receive their right to the attention of video game developers, of course before we got the Mafia game presented by the team Development Illusion Softworks in 2002 so that the series has an excellent start and gets several releases after the first part, and now, after more than 18 years, the first part returns to us with a remake that will take us back to the city of Lost Heaven to go through the life of a gangster again, so how was the experience?
The events of the story take place in the fictional city of Lost Heaven in the 1930s and take us on a journey through the history of Thomas Angelo, the taxi driver who met Paulie and Sam from the Don Salieri gang, who forced him to help them escape from the Don Morello gang, and from here the events disappear and Thomas joins the gang after To be bored with driving a taxi and the little pay that the profession achieves, the story is clearly inspired by the most famous Italian mafia films with some clear connotations to those films as it tries to embody the same atmosphere of its own while giving each main character its right of attention and depth. The new dialogues in the remake, as well as the good voice acting for us, which helped present a main cast of characters that stick in the minds of the story, are the most important elements of the series in general, and although it will not present anything strange about the Italian mafia films, it is still an exciting and interesting story in various details. .
The game benefited from having a remake with modern graphics to get a re-output of the various cinematic clips of the story, which made the story and its atmosphere more present and exciting, by talking about the general technical side, the game is uneven, and starting with the positives, the reflections and lighting in the game are wonderful and have been taken care of significantly. It reflects the surrounding environment beautifully, and if you enter and exit one of the tunnels, you will notice the perfect simulation of the feeling of the difference in lighting, and the different closed environments in which you will go through the tasks are full of minute and dense details of furniture, cracks in paint, and other beautiful effects.
Speaking of negatives, the rest of the game's details seem weak, such as smoke and fire, and the animation and lip movements of the main characters are okay, but they are bad in other characters, and the city of Lost Heaven looks blurry in some of its details, so the textures seemed to be ribbed in many of those details and it is clear that this project was lucky. With a budget that forced its developer to take care of some details more than others, the experience contains some simple technical errors that did not affect the playing experience and did not happen repeatedly, at the audible level, the game presented a group of beautiful melodies that gave an excellent depiction of events, and taking care of the sound effects was clear It is the other from the sound of tires rubbing against the asphalt during chases, the sounds of metal and the sounds of shattering windows when the vehicles receive damage or windows shatter.
The gameplay experience in the remake is very similar to the original version with some changes to the user interface, shooting and cover lacking features such as the ability to run towards the wall or the next barrier to take cover automatically behind it, and the aiming mechanism is a bit heavy and not accurate, which makes the shooting experience lacking smoothness and accuracy Required, driving vehicles got some improvements and it can be said that they are good in general, as they are not the best among the genre games and not the worst at the same time, one of the additions to the remake is to add traffic signs that appear in front of you to help you know the way towards your goal while driving instead of having to look To the mini-map in the corner of the screen to see where the next turn is, which is a nice addition despite its simplicity.
Unlike many similar games, Mafia is basically a linear game, so you go through the tasks of one story after another without any interruption between those missions and the beautiful experience is the variety of missions between chases and exchanges of fire or even simple missions in which you infiltrate and avoid drawing attention, which makes The experience is as varied as possible while presenting many exciting moments. Usually, the missions require you to drive from the center of the gang to a specific area at first, which is a boring routine in the game, but you are fortunately able to press one button to shorten the journey and directly reach your goal, which is a decision. Thanks to the developer, during the course of the story missions, you may want to collect some cards and pictorial magazines that exist as a kind of collectible elements, otherwise there is no content to occupy your time, there is a Free Ride phase that allows you to move in the open world of the game outside the scope of the story, but this world does not There is a lot to do besides driving and collecting some cards or discovering some secrets laid down for those who care about them.
Finishing the story took about 10 hours on the main difficulty, and you can go through the experience with the traditional difficulty to get a bigger challenge as reloading means running out of bullets from the comb of the weapon and the bullets cause more damage and the first aid kit is not as effective, but as we mentioned, the shooting mechanism in the game is not the best and fight The experience with higher difficulty may be more boring than fun, in the end, Mafia: Definitive Edition re-tells a story that may be the best among the various releases of the series.
Positives
- An exciting story with an atmosphere that emulates the Italian mafia movies with new cinematic directing and dialogue that provides a more polished story - the nature of the missions varies between infiltration and chasing or clashes with other gang members - taking care of some subtle details such as the intensity of closed environments, attention to lighting and reflections.
Negatives
- The correction mechanism is not the best and lacks features common to this generation, and hand-to-hand combat and white weapons are very primitive - the general features of the game world and its other technical details do not live up to the level offered by the effects mentioned above.