Played on:
Windows
Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven is one of those games that comes almost out of nowhere and surprises people with some great atmosphere and awesome gameplay. The hype for this game has been relatively small compared to the recent blockbusters in the last six months, which makes playing it all that much more enjoyable - I had no idea that this game was going to be this good.
At its heart, Mafia is an application of the Grand Theft Auto 3 formula to the gangster era of the 1930's. You do a lot of shooting and driving, and you can perform many of the same actions that are available in GTA3. The developers say on the Mafia site's FAQ that the GTA games didn't influence them that much, but to me, the similarities are obvious. Don't get me wrong, though, as I find this to be a good thing; Mafia is an excellent game that explores a setting previous games haven't really done much. On top of that, there are enough new things to do in here that make it more than just a GTA clone.
The game engine Mafia uses is custom-made by Illusion Softworks, and it's pretty damn good. The detail, both indoors and out, is excellent, and the frame rates aren't too bad. They're not particularly great either, though, so unless you have a real powerhouse computer, you can expect to have to turn down the video resolution and the details. On the system I listed above (a little above the "recommended" system), keeping the frame rate at 30fps or higher meant running at semi-low detail and in 800x600 resolution.
One of the things that stands out when playing Mafia is that you'll spend a decent amount of time indoors. Most of the major indoor locations will require some loading; it's not seamless. You'll know where that loading time went, though, as the detail indoors is excellent. It's definitely a nice addition when compared to GTA3, where you were almost never indoors and there wasn't too much world detail.
When you're outside, the view distance isn't quite as huge as GTA3's, but then again you'll know why - Mafia puts far more of your computer's horsepower towards the cars and people near you. The character and car models are very impressive, with high-resolution textures and lots of polygons going into them. Overall, it's a very worthwhile tradeoff.
Controls are definitely an important part of Mafia, since players are going to have to juggle the on-foot controls with the in-car ones. Pretty much all the control options from the PC version of GTA3 are here, with a few extras. For one, you can actually aim a gun out the window of a car and fire at people while driving. And I don't just mean straight left or straight right - you can use the mouse to aim just like when you're on foot. This makes for some great gangster-style car chases, with 3 guys in each car firing out their windows while travelling through the city at high speed.
Mafia focuses more on the on-foot gunfighting in later parts of the game, so the ability to dodge and aim at the same time are crucial. Switching weapons is easy enough, and firing them while in the third-person view is pretty convenient. Sometimes it was hard to tell if an object I was taking cover behind was going to obscure my shot, which was a bit of a hassle and could have been avoided with a proper first-person mode. Still, a test shot or two usually let me know whether I could fire out from behind my cover.
Simply put, Mafia looks great. Illusion Softworks captured a 1930's feel perfectly, and have used it well as you go throughout the game. The engine helps to push this along as well, as the cars and character models are beautifully detailed. Some of the character animations do look really weird or wrong, even the ones that are the focus of some of the major cutscenes. Despite that, I commend Illusion Softworks for trying them anyway. For example, whenever a character smokes a cigarette, their mouth doesn't actually open - it looks a bit weird, but it's still better than I've seen anyone else do for animations like these. Plus, it'd have been much more awkward to see a mafia game where no one smoked a cigar or drank some whiskey.
So let's go over the game's cutscenes. There are an absolute ton of them, and they're all done in the game engine. Illusion Softworks could have gotten cheap and just made still drawings (Max Payne-style), but that's just not right for this kind of game, and I'm glad they took the expense of doing it this way. Every time you complete a mission, you'll get a cutscene talking about the implications of what you've done, and it's pretty often that it will then move directly into the next mission. This adds up to some great game atmosphere, as the main characters manage to spend enough time on screen for you to actually start caring about them.
Mafia is a great game, but it's definitely flawed by some aspects that are really going to annoy and frustrate some players. Because of this, it's going to be a love-it or hate-it experience, and almost anyone who winds up not finishin the game is pretty likely to hate it.
After a few minutes of playing Mafia, you'll notice that it's structured a bit differently from what you might expect. In GTA3, you can ride around the city all you want, and do missions whenever you feel like it, as well as take part in a ton of extra missions aside from the main ones. To contrast, Mafia has a very structured mission system; there still are missions with no time limit and will let you drive around the city all you want before you get started. There are also a scant few optional missions, but overall you might feel limited by how it works. The one nice result of all this is that when you complete a mission, you'll get a cutscene that moves right into the next one. This reinforces the story much better than just a text message saying "Mission Passed!" or something like that.
In order to allow a more free-form game for players that demand that style, there is a specific mode called Free Ride. In this one, you earn money by doing violent things, and have to pay for weapons and healing at the hospital. If you beat the game, there's Free Ride Extreme, which eliminates the police completely and has some devilishly tough missions of its own. These modes are fun to screw around in for a while, but I don't see too many people coming back to these repeatedly. I definitely would have liked to see the Free Ride and main game modes integrated into the same game, as it just makes more sense to me that way.
Many of the missions you get will require you to drive around - a lot. Since Mafia takes place in the 1930's, the cars don't perform anything like today's cars, and even if you get a vehicle or two that can go over 80MPH, the cops will get you for speeding. Yep, in Mafia you can get ticketed for traffic violations like running red lights or speeding, and even for things like car crashes. And while there are a ton of cars you can use, as well as several variations on the major models you'll see, having a fast car usually won't make any difference. Since you'll mostly be creeping around at 40, a top speed of 80 won't do you much good.
