MAFIA, one of the best video games of all time, is getting a full remake this year

In highly surprisingly but welcome news, Take Two have confirmed that their classic 2002 video game Mafia has been completely remade for modern PCs and consoles and will be released in August. More modest upgrades of Mafia II and Mafia III are also being released.

Mafia (2002) was written off by many as a Grand Theft Auto clone on release, although it is only superficially similar. Set in 1930 in the fictional city of Lose Heaven, the game focuses on Tommy Angelo, a cab driver who inadvertently helps some gangsters get out of a sticky situation. They extend their gratitude and ask Tommy to work for them as a driver. Tommy is reluctant to get drawn into a life of crime, but as he is completely broke he feels he doesn't have much choice. He rises through the ranks of Dan Salieri's organisation, which is based on family, loyalty and respect...until that interferes with profits.

Mafia didn't reinvent the wheel story-wise even back in the day, but what it did do was use an advanced graphics engine (which left contemporaries like GTA: Vice City looking archaic in comparison) to create believable, 3D characters who could emote somewhat believably and use that to tell an intense story of family, love, betrayal and revenge. The game was not an open world title as such, instead progressing through a linear series of missions linked by impressive cut scenes. Once complete, a "Free Ride" option was triggered which allowed the player to explore the city at their leisure and engage in activities such as working as a taxi driver. The game was notable not just for its incredible (for the time) graphics and impressive writing and acting, but also it's very solid combat (based on the same developer's Hidden and Dangerous WWII games) and its impressive driving, which really got across the feeling of these older, heavier cars.

The game also featured something that we haven't really seen since in an open world game, namely a constantly-evolving environment. As the game progresses over a period of five years or so, old buildings are torn down and new ones are thrown up, and several new skyscrapers being construction. The cars also dramatically improve over the course of the game.

Mafia II (2010) was set in Empire Bay in 1945 and 1951 and told the story of a young war hero, Vito, who also gets drawn into a life of crime. The game tried hard not to repeat things from Mafia, with Vito remaining a low-life hoodlum throughout the game and being, how shall we say, considerably dumber than Tommy. The game had great combat and looked better graphically, but in almost every other way it was a huge letdown compared to the first game.

Mafia III (2016) was set in New Bordeaux in 1968 and focused on Lincoln Clay, an African-American Vietnam War vet who returns home and is promptly drawn into a gang war against the local mafia, forcing him to start his own criminal enterprise. Mafia III was praised for its setting, main character and the idea of being a mob boss, but criticised for its open world approach, which was negatively derivative of the likes of Grand Theft Auto V without being as accomplished. It was a solid game, and a big improvement on the forgettable second game, but got a bit lost in the sea of other GTA clones.

The new remasters are known as "Definitive Editions" and vary in the quality of their remastering from game to game: Mafia III doesn't seem to have been touched at all and will merely release with all of its DLC in one package. Mafia II's remaster is largely restricted to its graphics, which have seen a big upgrade since the game's original release ten years ago.

The real hard work was reserved for Mafia, unsurprisingly for an eighteen-year-old game. The game has been completely rebuilt from scratch in a new engine. The city layout, characters, storyline and missions seem to be the same, although it's unclear if the audio has been re-recorded from scratch or just upgraded. It's also unclear if the game's structure has been changed to a more traditional open world approach. These will likely be made clearer next week, when Take Two hosts a more thorough exploration of the package.

Mafia Definitive Edition will be released on 27 August 2020 on PC, X-Box One, PlayStation 4 and Google Stadia.

Mafia II Definitive Edition will be released on 19 May (yup, next week). All three games will be available in a package called Mafia Trilogy from August.

New BIOSHOCK game in development

2K Games is working on a new BioShock game, it has been confirmed.

Games website Kotaku unearthed the information as part of a wider investigation of the shrinking of Hanger 13 Studios, which owners 2K had downsized following the disappointing critical reception of Mafia III in late 2016. This was despite formidable sales for the game, which shifted 5 million copies in its first couple of months on sale. Hanger 13 spent some time developing both a Mafia IV concept and also an idea for a music-based superhero game named Rhapsody, which eventually collapsed.

As part of the investigation, it was revealed that some key Hanger 13 personnel had transferred to one of 2K's other studios to work on a project code-named Parkside. According to Kotaku's article, two interesting pieces of information came out of this. First is that the studio in question is 2K Marin, the much-troubled 2K subsidiary that was effectively shuttered in 2013 following the disappointing launch of The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. The studio appears to be have been reconstituted. The second piece of information was that Parkside is really the next game in the BioShock franchise.

The BioShock franchise is one of the most revered in modern gaming, a first-person shooter series with cutting-edge visuals and intelligent (if occasionally muddled) storytelling. Created by Ken Levine and Irrational Games, the franchise was seen as a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex and System Shock games developed by Looking Glass Studios and Ion Storm. Levine and Irrational developed the first and third games in the series, BioShock (2007) and Bioshock Infinite (2013), whilst 2K Marin worked on BioShock 2 (2010).

After the release of BioShock Infinite, Levine felt burned out from making high-pressure games with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. He wanted to make smaller-scale, narrative-focused games. To this end Irrational was rebranded Ghost Story Games and downsized massively. Levine and Ghost Story have been working on their debut title ever since. Given that the first 3 games had sold over 25 million copies between them, 2K confirmed that the BioShock series would continue, but some commentators were dubious of the series moving forward without Levine's guidance.

Nothing is known of the next BioShock game save that it will have some big shoes to fill without Ken Levine's singular vision. However, given that BioShock 2 was also made without any involvement from Levine and was an extremely strong game, that's not perhaps as much of an issue as it could have been.

The game is likely a long way off still, given it's not even been officially announced yet.

Mafia III

New Bordeaux, 1968. Lincoln Clay returns from Vietnam and, reluctantly, starts helping out his family and the criminal life he thought he'd left behind. A bank raid, pulled off with the help of the local mob, goes south and Clay is betrayed and left for dead. Surviving, he sets out to destroy the mafia family running the city and take everything over for himself.

Back in 2002, Illusion Softworks released Mafia (aka The City of Lost Heaven), one of the greatest video games of all time. Mafia had an incredible narrative focus and memorable characters, not to mention jaw-dropping graphics for the time. The game's story - of the rise, fall and escape of taxi cab driver turned mafia hitman turned state's witness Tommy Angelo - didn't break new ground, but the dialogue and voice acting certainly did. The gameplay was also quite good. Mafia achieved its feats through a strong narrative focus: the city was a backdrop with you moving directly from mission to mission. Despite some surface superficial similarities, the game was very much not Grand Theft Auto: 1930, and was all the better for it.

By the time Mafia II rolled around, Illusion Softworks had been taken over by Take 2 Interactive, the publishers of the Grand Theft Auto series, and it's clear that they wanted the team to make the game more like the GTA series, with lots of optional content, side missions and filler activities. Remarkably, the developers held their ground and, whilst Mafia II certainly had some more optional activities, it still wasn't a true open world game. Unfortunately, the game's story and characters were thin compared to the original game and it was much shorter, resulting in a less satisfying game overall (although still perfectly decent to play).

Mafia III, sadly, hoists the surrender flag on the series trying to do its own thing and not be a GTA clone. A new developer, Hanger 13, handles production duties on the game (helped by a few veterans of the first two titles) and it's clear they were told to make an all-out GTA clone...but bizarrely without anything approaching an appropriate budget. The result is a game that is extraordinarily frustrating, giving rise to some excellent gaming moments but then throwing it away with repetitive missions and a startling array of technical errors and crashes.

The game's opening is a near-unmitigated disaster. The opening few hours of the game introduce protagonist Lincoln Clay and depict him carrying out a bank raid which goes horribly wrong and leaves him betrayed and left for dead. Rather than simply tell this story, the game jumps backwards and forwards in time several times for no discernible reason, drops a ton of cut scenes into the mix and also brings in a framing device of a TV documentary in contemporary times looking back at these events. As a storytelling device this is perfectly fine (and gets a lot better later on), but the way it's presented at the start of the game is totally incoherent.

The game doesn't really get going until the city opens up and you're presented with the open world environment. This section of the game is the most interesting, but unfortunately is also the most repetitive. During Lincoln's adventures he allies with three criminals who agree to work with him to bring down the city's mafia family. As he drives the mafia out of each city district, overthrowing their crime bosses and taking over their rackets, he has to choose which ally to assign the district to. Make the wrong choice and your allies will start getting annoyed and will eventually turn on you. However, the game makes it pretty easy to avoid this: there are nine districts, so just give each ally three districts each and they'll be kept sweet forever (simply having a different number of districts that made it impossible to keep everyone sweet may have made the game more interesting).

The act of taking over each district is repetitive in the extreme: a local contact gives you intelligence on the bad guys. Once you've caused enough damage, the crime boss arrives to investigate. Then you kill them. You have to do this twice for each district (to flesh out the capo), so by the end of the game you've done this exact same activity eighteen times (twenty-seven if you count the final "boss fight" against the capo). It starts getting boring somewhere around the fifth.

Fortunately, the game breaks up the territory-control stuff with character-based side missions where you keep your allies on-side by helping them solve their own problems, and helping their lieutenants with activities such as gun-running and stealing trucks full of cannabis. There's also collectables to find (such as records and magazines), although not as many as in other games which means you might be tempted to actually do them, and activities such as street-racing which are actually quite good fun. The game also gives you a lot to do with your money, from customising vehicles to upgrading weapons.

The game also can't be flawed for its voice acting and a lot of its writing, which is very good when the story is actually allowed to move forwards. Set in 1968 and featuring a black protagonist, the game throws itself head-on into an exploration of racism and the civil rights movement, which makes for a sometimes ugly game but also a refreshingly honest one. The characters - particularly Clay and his criminal allies, plus his slightly-comical (but also psychotic) CIA friend Donovan - are really well-drawn. If Mafia III was allowed to focus in on the story, like the first two games, and drop the repetitive open-world stuff it would have been much stronger for it. The open world stuff also damages the game's attempts to be a period piece, by giving you a Satnav (not commonly found in cars in 1968) and a mobile phone (ostensibly a walkie-talkie, but it basically stands in for the mobile phone from the GTA games in most respects).

The game is all over the place in other areas. This is a game that came out three years after Grand Theft Auto V but looks like it came out three years earlier. Play this and Mafia II back-to-back and you would not be able to claim with a straight face that six years of video game development took place between them. Particularly awkward are character models: the main characters look really good but everyone else is awful. The environmental graphics are pretty decent, though, and the cars look really nice. The car handling is also pleasingly unrealistic. You can throw these cars around a lot more than the more "realistic" direction that GTA series has gone in and they're fun to drive throughout. On the audio side of things, the game has an excellent 1960s soundtrack, although the number of songs that the game licensed is surprisingly low. It's not long before the same songs and adverts start looping around again and again.

From a technical standpoint, the game is - eighteen months after release - a bit of a mess. I experienced a dozen crashes to desktop in the 33 hours it took me to finish the game, along with frequent screen tearing and clipping. Mission objectives frequently vanished on me, or sometimes took me to the wrong place, and the AI was utterly incoherent, missing me beating someone up in front of a bunch of cops whilst sending the entire city's police department after me for a tiny traffic violation. Pedestrians are also dumber than a box of frogs, often taking the novel decision to power-dive from the pavement into the middle of the street right in front of me for absolutely no reason.

The result of all of this is a bewilderingly inconsistent game, with fun driving and racing sequences, strong story missions and great music and voice-acting sitting alongside myriad bugs, dodgy AI and repetitive side content. Eventually the game gets into a rhythm where it becomes much more fun, helped by some good combat mechanics and - completely unexpectedly - a really strong stealth component. Sneaking into warehouses, and knocking out goons one-by-one before swooping out to deliver the coup de grace on a boss is extraordinarily satisfying.

Mafia III (***½) is a stronger game than Mafia II but not up to the standards of the original. As an open world game it is repetitive and dull, but it comes to life when the story and characters are allowed to breath. The driving, combat and stealth are all pretty decent, and ultimately you can have a lot of fun with the game. But those messy opening hours are a strong hurdle to get over. Mafia III is available now on PC, PS4 (UK, USA) and X-Box One (UK, USA).

MAFIA III announced via Jimi Hendrix

Mafia III has been formally announced (having been informally announced as probably existing last week). 2K have dropped a cinematic trailer confirming that this game will be rather different to its predecessors:

Mafia III takes place in 1968 in New Orleans, dropping the fictional cities of the previous two games for a real-world locale. The game will apparently include the city as it appeared in 1968 as well as the surrounding bayous and the lower Mississippi. In an unexpected twist, the game will feature the Italian mafia as the enemy, with your character (Vietnam veteran Lincoln Clay) instead joining forces with one of the city's black gangs and going up against the Italians. The character of Vito (from Mafia II) will also return as one of Lincoln's allies.

Mafia III will also apparently be more of an open-world game than its two linear predecessors, with the player having more control over how the gang expands territory and what jobs they take on. The game will also feature a branching storyline and allow you to take over the city via deception and cunning, or outright violence.

Gamespot have a trailer showcasing some actual gameplay. Both trailers suggest that the game will feature a significant amount of licensed, contemporary music from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and The Animals.

Mafia III will be released in 2016.

MAFIA III pre-announced

Apparently, announcing that something is going to be announced is now a thing. 2K Games have confirmed that they will be announcing the existence of Mafia III with a trailer on 5 August. Which is weird, but okay (and at least it's not a trailer for a trailer, which is even more annoying).

Mafia III is, shockingly, the sequel to Mafia (2002) and Mafia II (2010), both developed by Illusion Softworks (now 2K Czech). Mafia was praised for its graphics - a massive step up from the then-contemporary Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City - and its highly memorable characters and storyline, as well as its measured pacing the clever way the city evolved between missions if long periods of time passed. Mafia II took place in a bigger city and of course was graphically more impressive, but its story was less compelling and its cast of characters altogether less memorable.

Mafia III has been developed primarily by Hanger 13, a new studio formed by veterans of LucasArts along with a couple of ex-Illusion staffmembers. 2K Czech is providing support, although a lot of the talent behind the first two games in the series have now left to form a new studio, Warhorse Studios, which is working on the medieval roleplaying game Deliverance: Kingdom Come.

Not much can be discerned about the game, but the cars and hairstyles in the only image released so far suggests that it will be set in the 1960s or 1970s. That makes sense given that the original game spanned much of the 1930s and the second was set in the early 1950s. It'll be interesting to see what Hanger 13 can come up with.