Verdict
Mafia: The Old Country looks backward, both in its setting and design ethos. Combining gorgeous visuals, strong character work, and scrappy action set pieces, the outcome is a confident, understated crime game that does exactly what it’s supposed to.
A lot of mob stories are formulaic by design. The audience meets a criminal protagonist, watches them rise from street-level thug to a position of wealth and power, then sees their inevitable fall from grace. Despite their predictability, the movies, TV shows, and videogames that stick most closely to this well-known formula can still offer emotional resonance, nuanced cultural insight, sheer entertainment, or some resounding combination of the above. It’s how a mob story is told that really matters, in the end.
Mafia: The Old Country follows this formula, too. It’s also, in the balance, one of the better examples of a crime-focused action-adventure game, thanks in large part to the way it remains committed to its genre inspirations.
Our story begins in 1904, with a young man called Enzo who’s laboring in the dust-choked tunnels of a Sicilian mine and dreaming of a better life, represented by a friend’s postcard of the fictional American city of Empire Bay. Following a confrontation with the owner, who just so happens to be a mafia captain, Enzo finds himself in the employ of a rival crime family led by Don Torrisi, a squat, raspy-voiced man who speaks and looks like a blend of Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro in the first two Godfather movies.
From this point on, The Old Country establishes its intent, in both structure and storytelling. Enzo begins to prove himself to the Torrisi family, ascending over the next three in-game years from a worker at its vineyards to an initiated mafioso.
As he does so, the player gets into the game’s rhythm. The Old Country formats its chapters into a procession of cutscenes; conversations held while walking, driving cars, or riding horses; and frequent shootouts, knife fights, and chases. It quickly becomes clear that the game is interested primarily in telling its story above all else, using the rolling hills of early 20th-century Sicily not as a sandbox for players to explore freely, but as the lavish backdrop for a tightly directed series of pre-determined missions.
This is a smart choice. The Old Country looks to the past for both its setting and structure, replicating the design of 2002’s Mafia and 2010’s Mafia 2 while doing away with the extraneous side missions that bogged down 2016’s otherwise excellent Mafia 3. Rather than distract from its plot with hours spent encouraging exploration, creator Hanger 13 guides the player from one story beat to the next, maintaining stronger control of the game’s pace all the while.
The Old Country sticks to this lean style of design throughout. Aside from spending the money Enzo relieves from enemy corpses on horse and car customizations, new firearms and knives, or, in goofy adherence to theme, stat-boosting beads and medallions for his rosary, there is very little in the way of unnecessary skill unlocking or attribute tweaking. As a result, the combat is straightforward and largely unchanged from the game’s opening through to its conclusion. Enzo can sneak through some locations, strangling unaware opponents or stabbing them with his knife, but when he’s caught, the ensuing gunfights are gratifyingly designed.
There’s a scrappy quality to The Old Country’s ranged combat, with Enzo ducking from one point of cover to another as enemies emerge, swapping between a range of pistols, shotguns, and rifles scooped up from the ground, or tossing grenades and bandaging up wounds on the fly. These battles are a bit simple, but they’re not boring, owing to strong audio work and a fast pace that means any given shootout doesn’t last for too long.
Unfortunately, when Enzo enters scripted moments where he loses his gun and faces a single enemy in one-to-one knife fights, the sense of desperation that animates The Old Country’s gunplay evaporates. In these sequences, the game devolves into a simple back-and-forth of timed parries and dodges, sweeping lunges and quick strikes, where reacting to easily telegraphed incoming moves with the appropriate counter feels too stiff and robotic to be exciting. The big health bars hanging fighting game-style from the top and bottom of the screen during these encounters further their sense of artificiality.
The Old Country makes up for even the least thrilling of fights with its setting, however, which enlivens just about every aspect of the game. There’s plenty of spectacle offered in sequences that see Enzo sneaking or gunning through various levels, including everything from a burning factory to the dusty catacombs and gleaming upper floors of an opera house. There are also cross-country horseback chases and car races that take place across narrow village streets and dirt roads lined by cheering onlookers. But there’s beauty in The Old Country’s quieter moments, too – whether you’re leisurely riding a horse or driving a primitive car through the bucolic Sicilian countryside, or strolling down the cobblestone streets of the fictional city of San Celeste under the baking sun or in the cool of a seaside night, the ambiance is just right.
These kinds of details are reflected in the game’s performances as well. A tense conversation between Enzo and other members of the Torrisi family is often just as exciting as an action set piece, mostly due to strong character writing and acting, deft direction, and a gorgeous, well-used score. While the story holds back a bit too much from showing just how despicable Enzo’s criminal work truly is – something that makes his soulful questioning of life as a mafioso fall a little flat – The Old Country’s cast is portrayed convincingly enough that its take on the well-worn plot conventions of its genre remains engrossing throughout.
All of this stems from a confidence in vision that makes The Old Country far richer than its adherence to mob genre storytelling might suggest. There’s a purity to its concentration on small-scale character work, mood setting, and straightforward action that stands apart from the tendency toward convolution and inflation found in so many other big budget videogames. Mafia: The Old Country is a game that knows what it wants to do and rarely deviates from offering just that. In the end, as with any take on a familiar type of story, that makes all the difference.
