Review: Mafia 3 (PC)
I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse…
Lately, I’ve been in the mood for open world games, with tasks, oh yes I want a list of objectives to complete. This escalated with Just Cause 3 whereby I didn’t want to succumb, I needed to finish everything, which I managed just in time for the release of Mafia 3, another open world game, which up to now has managed to satiate borderline OCD tendencies. Enter Lincoln Clay, a hard as nails war vet who returns from Vietnam to find another war taking place in his own backyard, the city of New Bordeaux. With a New Orleans vibe, Lincoln will seek vengeance in the only way he knows how to, by completing list after list of tasks, by carrying out an archetypical concept that has been used time and time again within open-world games. Am I criticising this routine structure that facilitates my exploration of a large environment? Not at all, I love it! That being said, Mafia 3 is not without its flaws, they aren’t subtle or often easy to ignore, such as an abundance of technical issues that have plagued the game since its release and the possibility of becoming burnt out through the repetitive nature of the missions.
I’ll admit here and now, I became severely burnt out with my playthrough, I distinctly remember lurching over my desk more or less forcing myself to play and it almost beat me. This was how I felt for the last 10 hours of the game. Despite this I’m so thankful that I decided to push on, although the narrative is heavy, I was fairly on board and boy if you stick with it, well let’s just say there’s some pretty excellent writing with some amazing twists. That being said, there’s some pretty shocking and thought provoking moments, some of which made me cringe and leave a bad taste in my mouth. This was particularly the case in the sense of how Mafia 3 portrays the racial tensions that were so prevalent within 1960’s American culture and the political complexities that were so synonymous with the Vietnam War. Hanger 13 have done a superb job at providing a clear image of what I would have assumed to be difficult themes to include within any games narrative, which is accompanied with an extremely submersive setting that only furthered how absorbed I became.
That being said, I felt I had to forgive a lot to get through to the end. This was at large due to how dull and uncreative most of the missions were. It really became severely monotonous and thus took me a while to complete. I just lost motivation and wasn’t sure if it was going to be worth carrying on. I did it, I enjoyed moments and there was certainly a lot of substance here. Can I recommend this game? Well that all depends, the story itself is certainly worthy of anyone’s time, its complex, encroaches on real issues both within the past and present, its involving and shocking. Yet you will have to push yourself through some absurdly dull gameplay at times, and I do feel the narrative would have served a game that was not within the realm of the ‘open world’ genre.
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