I love stealth gameplay and found Mafia 3's implementation to be very satisfying. don't know if this is quite how the game is supposed to be played, but pistol sniping with the silencer was fun regardless. Blasting motherfuckers with the shotgun never got old and the animations for melee attacks rival DOOM in how satisfying they could be. Those complaints out the way though, the gunplay was absolutely fantastic and I loved the visceral intensity of every firefight.
Not that bad anymore compared to launch from what I've heard, but some of the AI is laughable (the banker and weapons guy keep getting stuck or running people over while driving way, they even once flew straight into an enemy base running several of them over and reaping chaos completely by accident for me once) and I noticed tons of graphical glitches on PC, even in the cutscenes which is just. I appreciate the effort the developers too in prioritizing the gameplay experience but I feel like it just didn't work out for me.Īlso bugs. I don't like that the game incentivizes playing like this, and really wish that I could skip the damage building and go straight to taking over rackets to make the process of reaching lieutenants and Capos, the best parts of the game, much easier. Once I had sufficiently figured out how the game was structured I began prioritizing missions based on how close they were to each other and basing my decisions on how efficient the takedown of rackets could be made. To get the gripes out of the way first, I felt that this game could have been ten hours shorter and been better for it. Of course, these two characteristics are anything but mutually exclusive, but even so I found myself appreciating what Mafia 3 had to offer. It took me the better part of a month to beat it I think, mostly during long binge sessions on weekends because that's the only time I have to really settle in for a game like this.Īnyway though, what a game! Despite having overall mixed feelings about its strengths and weaknesses, as I've grown older and more attuned to my own tastes I've found myself gravitating more towards ambitious, flawed but memorable games like this versus outstandingly polished but relatively by the numbers AAA releases.
My playtime ended up being 30 hours, which between now having a full time job for the first time in my life (yay!) and also still being in my last year of undergrad meant this was a sloooow burn. Hi ERA, so I just got done playing Mafia 3 for the first time and wanted to talk about it a bit.