Mafia

I'll start this review by mentioning the issue people bring up a lot when talking about story-based games, particularly for those of an open world genre, and that is ludonarrative dissonance. The matter of players' own actions not aligning with the given narrative of the game.

Mafia 1, while still not perfect, manages to offer up some solutions.



For example, take gta. The illusion of you playing as a smart, opportunistic and cautious criminal mastermind goes right out of the window the moment you open fire on random civilians just because you can and then promptly start a full-blown war against the police force.



Not saying it's not possible to do so in mafia 1, but you're more discouraged to do so on the account of just how many rules are set in place and how the game wants you to immerse yourself further in playing as a criminal. The police system is strict and works meticulously well. You're able to get arrested for exposing your gun, citations can be written if you are caught speeding or knocking out fire hydrants and other city property and even crossing a red light. Furthermore, arrests will only be made if the player refuses to collaborate, and shots will only be fired if the player shoots first.



The combat itself is clunky too,with headshots being really difficult to score and there being a lot of recoil. This, however, makes for really tense and memorable combat encounters as death can also occur really fast and there are very few healing items scattered about the levels. Any attempts to escape the law or drive recklessly are also hardened by the fact that your driving around in really limited and slow 30s' era vehicles and the persistent cop ai.



All these deliberate design choices make it so that the player is not entertained by going off course in the narrative and engaging in spontaneous shootouts or other different crazy activities, but more likely inconvenienced and frustrated. It helps that the city in Mafia 1 only serves as a background for the story and not a virtual playground.

There's only one optional set of missions involving you stealing various cars and keeping them for yourself.



The story itself (at least in my opinion) isn't all that great.It's riddled with mob movie clichés, and even one of the main characters is heavily based on the mob boss from Goodfellas. Also, the voice acting is not all that great.

But it's the way it's actually presented that makes it so memorable, not to mention all the little-in game details that go a long way into making this game even better. Stuff like wheel support, vehicles getting more deformed as they're damaged, ability to run out of fuel etc. And the cutscenes looked great for the time and still look presentable, to the point where I didn't start picking on all the little weird details, like in Vice City where you could see the individual polygons making up the characters.

Overall, to close, I recommend this game to anyone who wants to relive some early 2000s experimental gaming goodness which brought us so many gems such as this one.

only game to play before you die