Sholva Mafia: The Old Country Review

A very solid Mafia story, with great characters. With The Old Country we basically get what was promised: a linear, narrative focused, Mafia story, and I’m happy to say that’s exactly what we got. First things first, this is a PC review, so some of my personal experiences with this port: It is an UE 5 game, albeit clearly AA in budget, it is still quite demanding on the hardware. On my Ryzen 7 5700 X and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, I can run the game quite decently at 1440p with DLSS but, if I want that extra smooth experience with 100+ Output FPS, I need to add Multi Frame Generation at 3x, via the Nvidia App, for this game. This allows me to enjoy the game at 1440p, Quality DLSS and normally stay above 100 FPS (with MFG, again). It is smooth and latency is not an issue, as it’s the case for MFG, it’s quite well designed that way so that latency only becomes noticeable quite above 100 ms, which never happens for me in this game. The High Graphics preset offers a good 30%+ performance boost over Epic, as it so happens in most UE 5 titles, while still looking quite decent so, if you’re in need of the extra FPS or you want to aim for very high resolutions, the settings you should focus on are Global Illumination, and Shadows. This is also a rare UE 5 game that does not have any major shader compilation stutters, so it feels quite smooth, overall. Story wise, this game is very intense, dramatic and emotive, it felt like a trough and trough Mafia series story, and we all know how most Mafia stories end, don’t we? Nothing else to say, but it was pretty good, in my opinion. Gameplay wise, it reminds me a lot of Mafia: Definitive Edition, maybe even simpler, which for some people may be a negative, I didn’t mind though, it was fine, nothing special, did its job. The world itself has quite a decent amount of collective, albeit as in previous games, it’s not mandatory to get them, even the ones we can exchange for money, as really the little Character Progression there is, does not impact gameplay too much, and I finished the game in Hard Difficulty: it’s not a very difficult game at all. This is probably its weakest point, its world feels a bit empty, despite the possibility of some exploration at times (not always), so…yeah, it is what it is, some sacrifices were clearly made here. Voice acting, in English at least, which is what I played, is exceptional, incredible performance from the leading actors, with some chilling moments with certain characters, so well done, and animated too, great job. Music was good, in line with most games in the series, even evoking at times some tones from future games, heh. Speaking of future games, without being concrete here, there are references to Mafia I and particularly the second game, and that was quite nice to see, even when certain characters appeared for the first time and I realized who they were, nice. I had some gripes with certain Keybind issues here and there, and the game could use a couple extra polishing or QOL improvements, but that’s it. All in all, for its asking price, 50€ or even close to 40 with a current discount, the game took me almost 20 hours to beat, more or less, without doing all the collectibles (which you can complete in the Exploration mode, anyway). I’d say if this game is a “testing ground” to see if there’s interest for more and denser games in the series, I’d say yes please: I would love a new mainline game in the series, bigger but in the “more dense” sense of the word, not “open world” per se, I think the series does not need to go fully Open World to have great experiences.