2.5/5 ★ – juhogr's review of Mafia: Definitive Edition.

I never played the original game, so this review is based solely on the remake. I have to say, I liked it less and less the further I got. I mean, the story has been praised as the game’s strongest element… but I don’t know. Surely it’s nothing that hasn’t been seen in mafia films. Also, I found it problematic that the epilogue’s emotional climax was supposed to be about Tommy’s family, but we barely got to see them before the end in the course of the main game. Sarah had some sequences, but we didn’t see her and Tom’s wedding, nor the childbirth (or indeed the child herself), and barely had a moment to see their actual home. So the end felt kind of hollow. The gameplay has been criticized to no end, and I don’t know if I have anything new to add. Maybe just that I found the driving to be the most okay part of it. Everything else — shooting (especially aiming at quickly moving targets), climbing, running, walking — was a lot worse. I did eventually get used to the way the controls felt, and at times the cover shooting sequences were all right, but at no point did it get as good and enjoyable as one would hope. The definitive edition does have the option to tweak the sensitivity of the controls, but I felt that the ideal setting would’ve been different for aiming, different for walking, different for driving etc. I ended up setting them back and forth in certain sequences, and… yeah, that’s just not how it should work. I’m not a big fan of checkpoint-based saving systems anyway, but I guess here it worked mostly all right. A few frustrating moments of dying because of the clunky controls and then being sent back a longer way than I’d expected. But nothing major. Loading screens definitely took their time, of course it could just be my equipment, but I have a 2023 PS5 so I kinda doubt it… The longer cutscenes didn’t bother me, they were mostly quite good, but I did not like when shorter cutscenes interrupted the gameplay flow mid-mission, leaving me waiting when and what to do next. The missions were kind of repetitive in my opinion… or alternatively they tried to introduce some new gimmick which the game hadn’t prepared the player to in any way beforehand. The race sequence is the most infamous example, but I felt there were other ones too. The acting was good, and I liked the main characters and their dynamics. I did enjoy the feel and the look of the city and the worldbuilding. And the jazz on the radio! I enjoyed some parts of the story, even though it left me kind of ambivalent in the end. And as I said, actually the driving was OK for me. So, I had some good times with it and I did finish it, which is something. But the flaws were unfortunately too big of a setback for me to give a better score.