Mafia 3 Reviews
Mafia 3 is a great step forward for storytelling in games that is dragged down by its consistently unpolished and poorly executed mechanics.
Mafia III is an engaging narrative with a sadly incomplete system, padded out by repetitive missions and tiresome collectables.
Mafia III had great potential, but the devs almost killed the game by artificial repeating quests. At least story is still interesting and if you can look past the repetition, it might still be worth playing. But you still might want to wait for patches.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Mafia III is a smartly written and enthralling open-world action game bogged down by technical issues and a repetitive structure.
Mafia III’s compelling narrative inevitably comes crashing down the moment it starts being an open-world action game.
The story and setting in Mafia III are compelling enough to get you to battle past many of these flaws – just to see what happens next – but the multitude of flaws do leave a sour taste in the mouth. There are multiple endings on offer, but these are based solely on one final decision at the end, meaning that there are no consequences if you play the entire affair as a ruthless killer, and no real reward for sparing lives – aside from a small cash boost, but you will never find yourself short on money. As such, the missions sadly turn into a grind just to reach the endgame – just to find out how Lincoln's tale ends. A repetitive and bug-laden affair, the gameplay and mechanics just don't do justice to what is a finely balanced representation of racial tension in 1960's America.
Mafia 3 has one of the best stories we've seen between the video games that released this year. However it suffers greatly from a repetitive gameplay experience, mediocre mechanics, and bad visuals. It's stellar story is not enough to make up for how disappointing everything else is.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
While it could have used some better side quests and maybe a bit more graphical polish, Mafia III's narratives is one of my favorites in 2016 so far.
'Mafia III' put a high priority on its backstory, immersion, and presentation. That work shows in the quality of the narrative and the tragic characters, but unfortunately left little to flesh out the city of New Bordeaux. It's worth playing for the campaign, but perhaps there isn't a need to rush.
The story really is great, the shooting feels good, and getting more and more powerful is rewarding. Unfortunately though, Mafia III is plagued with head-scratching design decisions.
Mafia III's biggest problem, then, is that the stuff you actually do as Lincoln is mind-numbingly repetitive. He and his associates have put together a rigid strategy for taking down their enemies. You drive from point to point killing mooks and destroying property, then go back to a place you've already been to kill a more powerful mook, and when you do that enough, you're rewarded with a mission to kill an even more powerful mook in a unique environment, like a dilapidated racist theme park. These set pieces are a merciful break in the monotony, but they're rare and all devolve into the same run-and-gun festivities.
Games are expensive, and the modern gamer is often extremely wary of where to invest their time and earnings. However as gamer's we shouldn't allow quantity to overpower quality.
Even the strongest of stories can't save Mafia III from falling prey to genre conventions, and too many at that.
It's a diamond in the rough, though, and this jankiness is a mild distraction at worst. The appeal of Mafia III is the stories it tells – both the textual narrative, and the multitude of emergent ones that come from simply existing in a place as rich and complex as New Bordeaux. It certainly has its flaws, but in balancing the over-the-top action of a crime game with a pointed look at real-life racism, and in its fantastic re-creation of the '60s American South, Mafia III has achieved something special.
With its rich characterisation, documentary style focus and its unrelenting scrutiny of the darkness within American culture, Mafia 3 provides a thoughtful and at times confrontational experience which since now has been missing from the open world genre.
The worst that can be said of Mafia III is that it's tolerable. This is also the best that can be said. A perfectly sufficient game that does nothing unique with a unique setting, providing instead hours upon hours of predictable, uniform material. Likeable enough, but nowhere near as gripping as it should have been.
If anything, I think the game is worth checking out for the story alone. It's unfortunate that the gameplay is so much of a slog that some players may not think the story is worth the trouble. However, if you have the time, the extra coin, and love mob stories, this tale has a satisfying end.
Like the era it paints, Mafia III feels like a relic. It's dated, has obvious flaws, and doesn't hold up particularly well when compared to a lot of modern works. Most damning, it's rarely in tune with itself, often contradicting itself in big ways. It's tough to not feel like Lincoln Clay deserved better than this.