Mafia III (2016, Playstation 4) Review

(2 / 4)

Also on: Windows, Macintosh, Xbox One

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RACISM - A KILLING SPREE SIMULATOR

With the inclusion of Mafia III as a PS Plus "freebie", I grabbed the opportunity to play a game I'd never pay to play. Having finished it, nothing has changed - I still would not pay for this game, nor would I advice anoyone else to. Mafia III is very competent in certain regards, but a failure in others. Consequently, I feel totally indifferent towards it. Every genre and subgenre it touches, there's better to be had. The cutscenes elevate the game as a whole, but then again, few of them really measure up to the scenes of even a half-decent gangster flick like, say, Carlito's Way.

Mafia III takes place in the year 1968, in and around the fictional city of New Bordeaux. Much effort has gone into crafting the location, and it is very well put together on the superficial level; the redneck infested outskirts, the neon-lit Downtown and French Wards, the run-down industrial blocks, and of course the Bayou, where you'll get eaten by alligators if you speed off a bridge. It's of course a makeshift New Orleans, and as a location it shines, and is - along with the storytelling, dialogue and voice acting - the star of the show.

PRETTY BASIC STORY

Race and racism permeates every beat of the story and its staging. You, the player, assume the role of Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam veteran of mixed blood. He was abandoned by his mother at the age of two and raised in an orphanage. He stayed there until the day Sammy Robinson, head honcho of the New Bordeaux black mob, adopted him into "the family".

"Family isn't who you're born with, it's who you die for", Lincoln ominously remarks early on. His family is quick to catch on as they're suddenly and entirely wiped out by the treacherous Sal Marcano, the Don of the Marcano Crime Family and supposed ally of Robinson.

Lincoln Clay miraculously survives a shot to the head and is dragged to safety and nursed back to health by Father James, a clergyman and close friend of Lincoln's. As he slowly recovers, Lincoln vows to wreak vengeance upon all of the Marcanos, from bottom to top, until Sal's gone and justice has been served.

This is your grand entrance, taking control over ex-soldier Lincoln's actions and decisions. You wage war and untangle the intricacies of the open world of organized crime, all the while building up a crime syndicate of your own.

Lincoln controls through the third person-perspective, either via foot or behind the steering wheel. The enemy far outnumber you, so you have to resort to lots of stealth, but at times you are unavoidably thrust into unforgiving combat situations. It's a hard-knock life being a man of color in a world of prejudice, and if you get killed during one of your missions, you might have to start it over from the beginning, with all your unstored cash cut by half. Checkpoints are sparse, failure is costly.

...BUT IT'S EXCELLENTLY TOLD

The story in itself is good but not wholly original. It's basically a revenge tale (it somehow reminded me of the movie The Crow) set in the world of 60's organized crime, but the way it's told is intriguing. Strung together almost like a documentary, the story unfolds through "talking head"-interviews with some of the characters later in life, as they reminisce about the old times you're playing.

These scenes are interwoven with trial hearings, news footage and lots of traditional cutscenes as you play. All put together, the material provides a sense of time, of racial tensions, and of stakes that are bigger than the personal story at its core. It's all very well staged and acted.

This way it feels like we, as the players, are uncovering some previously unknown historical events. That's some hot stuff right there, and keeps us playing, pushing us forward towards the climax with the Marcanos at the very top. It is a triumph of traditional storytelling in video games. Unfortunately, it's also a clash between narrative and gameplay. I can get the allure of an open world, but does the neatly crafted story structure really support the open world we get?

THE PITFALLS OF THE OPEN WORLD

We're following the events through flashbacks, and should be served the highlights of the story. When framed as a documentary of old, violent times, it doesn't make sense to learn about the mundane tasks you're often performing whilst cruising the open world. Stuff like looking for collectibles, taking part in irrelevant racing activities, stealing cars, breaking into stores for money and supplies, taking over one insignificant racket after the other - all of this is the trademark of an open world sandbox. Unfortunately, all of it also detracts from the flow of the story.

And the worst crime: It doesn't even allow fast travel. That's right - anywhere you want to go, you need to drive manually. Occasionally you have to escape pursuing mobsters or the police. If you fail, you have to restart the drive. This is a crap decision, considering the creators for once had a narrative tool to justify a "Fast Travel"-system (not that it needs justification) - the long driving scenes could simply have been "edited out" of the finished documentary, or report, or whatever this material is supposed to result in.

I get it, Mafia III is wider in scope than the merely personal. And the city of New Bordeaux is too good a place to simply be left out in the periphery. If you fast travel everywhere, you miss a lot of the voodoo of location.

THE RESULT IS A SLOG

I'm not saying that an open world is wrong per se. The fault is in the way that the creators (Hangar 13) exploit it. They make you perform highly repetitive busywork to artificially prolong the game. The only way the open world would have worked was if they handcrafted every mission to seem unique, every car ride relevant, and every step taken a part of the plan.

This is not a realistic demand. I think what happened was that Hangar 13 took to heart the popular notion that plagued the Mafia II critique - that there was too little side content. Well, they listened, and now in Mafia III, I claim that the "side content"-style missions drag the game down into mediocrity.

They could have taken another route; skipped the open world altogether, or trimmed it down significantly to a few, small hub areas, spicing up the story instead. After all, that's where the game excels. Maybe they could have had you control Sammy Robinson for the first half of the game, meticulously leveling him up towards a grand goal as the main man of New Bordeaux. And when he is unavoidably betrayed and killed halfway through, you assume control of his protegé Lincoln Clay. If your heart is not filled with desire for vengeance then, you must be a saint.

Worst of all, from what I glean of the Mafia III-writing that's on the page, the writers would have been more than up to the task. They have a way with dialogue and subtext, creating drama by simply making characters say one thing and possibly mean something else. We have rarely seen this in video games. All the actors are in on it as well, and we have the technology to support such subtleties.

But alas, we didn't get a game focusing on its strengths. Instead we got the open world and all the monotonous "side content" you could dream of. Well, if you asked for it I hope you enjoyed it, because I sure as hell didn't.

SIDE CONTENT OF HELL

The game just reeks of repetition. To take down Sal Marcano, you have to enlist help from three fallen-from-grace gangster bosses that vie for different parts of the city. Street by street, part by part, business by business, you seize control of New Bordeaux. This also doubles as a rudimentary leveling system - as your allies gain power, they get the resources to provide you with better statistics, equipment and services. But in order to do so, you personally have to complete side missions, or rackets, as they're called.

They all basically play out the same: You reach a fenced area. The enemy awaits within. There are a number of entrances. You pick one, nevermind which one, it hardly matters. You stealthily take out the guardpost, if there is one, which is very easy. You sneak in, hide behind some cover and whistle to get one guard's attention. He approaches. When he gets close, you silently kill him, and quickly hide behind another cover. Repeat until there's no one left. If the last few guys are crowded together, approach them, say "Here, catch!", and throw them a grenade. They die. And that's it, you've won. Nothing can stop you from taking care of the mission objective.

To illustrate, I even recorded one such racket for you:



The world might be big and open, but there's not a whole lot of freedom of approach. The lion's share of Mafia III relies on these very limited game mechanics. To be fair, a few vehicular exceptions exist, but they are hardly any more fun. Besides, calling these missions "side content" is to bend the truth more than a little, since you have to do a lot of them before you're allowed to proceed with the main campaign.

Now, you don't have to do them precisely the way I described above. You can rush in, guns ablazing, and maybe you'll win more quickly. But then again, maybe you won't win at all and what then? You have to do it all over from the beginning.

Of course, there is a way to weasel yourself out of it. As your wealth increases, you also gain the ability to virtually inexhaustibly call for reinforcements from one of your partners. They can basically win any fight for you while you just sit back and watch them wreak havoc. Should they perish, just call in more guys. At that point, I chose to refrain from using them unless I was in a real bind. I didn't want to squeeze all of the gameplay out of this game.

COMBAT IS PLENTIFUL AND PAINFUL

Should you choose to fight the old-fashioned way, you'll find that combat is not too easy - at least not before you've gotten the hang of how the enemy acts. If your cover is blown, you'll have a hard time staying alive. Lincoln can take a couple of shots -- a couple more if you find him a Tac-Vest -- but stay unprotected for long and he's toast. You can heal him using adrenaline shots, but he can only carry a limited number. Lincoln controls a little clumsily, but that is a good, realistic choice given his body type. I mean, look at him. Someone with the physique of a doorman shouldn't control like a weasel.

However, the enemy AI, as demonstrated in this following video, is pretty easy to exploit after you figure out how it works:



To be honest I got a few chuckles out of it, so I won't hold it against the game. And the innocent citizens behave more or less the same. The enemy learn no new tactics throughout the course of the game. They only evolve through sheer quantity. Closer to the end they can take more hits, but that hardly matters - you can still one-shot them using stealth takedowns, explosives or molotovs. Once you find your winning tactics, you'll be able to use it to the very end.

These facts stopped me from caring much about anything apart from the main story. The disconnect between me and the AI dummies inhabiting the city gave me no incentive to never take the easiest way out. Say, for instance, that a room was packed with bunched up enemies, and there were a few innocent, non-hostile AI fools among them. I would gladly throw a few grenades in there, killing foe and fool alike, to speed up gameplay.

I remember only one occasion where I cared enough to prevent collateral damage. I happened upon a modern day, KKK-style slave auction that I could have easily cut short with the work of a grenade. Instead I let loose my machine gun, sparing none but the slave. That was as much benevolence I could muster for this game. In the end, I was expecting to be punished for my cruelty. That did not happen at all. So it goes.

TO SUMMARIZE

Granted, the few main story missions we get are unique and good. At times they're even fun and challenging, and there's a great story payoff at the end of each one. But these are very few and far between - so much so that it's hard to build up the necessary excitement for them. Embodying Lincoln Clay, we're supposed to share in his rage and undying thirst for vengeance as we tear through the enemy ranks, but that emotion's hardly projected onto the player as we're not sure how the victim at hand offended us to begin with. Between the equally strong beginning and end is the tedious slog through New Bordeaux. As you play along, real life turn days into weeks, and the end goal gets murkier by the minute.

The themes of racism and racial tension are strong in theory, but nonetheless betrayed by the same thing that sabotages the entire story; gameplay. All the oppression that Lincoln endures isn't very shocking when compared to the droves of bodies, innocent or not, that's left in his wake as you play. Lincoln avenges the death of a handful by killing thousands - most of whom had no connection to his family's demise - and replaces them with the equally corrupt. The man is, to put it lightly, a deranged psychopath. Granted, one created by his own tragic backstory and corrupt surroundings, but this fact still tends to overshadow everything else the game has to offer thematically.

In other words - the racism stuff is drowned out by a way louder message saying something like: "To survive in a grim world, you have to become the Grim Reaper." However you feel about that, let's just agree that it's not a very novel approach in the world of gaming.