Mafia: Definitive Edition

Lost Heaven, 1930. In the wake of the Wall Street Crash, the American economy is tanking and honest cab drivers like Tommy Angelo find themselves barely able to scrape by. Tommy finds himself helping two gangsters escape from a crime scene; when he gets them to safety, they ask him to work for them. From then on, Tom's life gets richer and a lot more interesting...but also a lot more dangerous.

Mafia, originally released in 2002, is one of my favourite video games of all time. It came out in the wake of Grand Theft Auto III but rather than replicate it's open-world design, mixing a central storyline with side-quests and optional activities, it instead focused on telling a linear, intense story of crime, redemption and loss. The game spans a period of eight years and chronicles how Tommy becomes a respected (and feared) member of the local community. He enjoys the camaraderie of fighting alongside his fellow mobsters and becoming a member of "the family," but he has a conscience. When civilians are killed in the crossfire, he starts to regret his choices, and when he becomes a husband and father he realises what the risks are. His bromantic view of life in the family becomes replaced by the cold, hard reality of the fact that they are criminals and murderers.

For 2002 this was advanced stuff; the same year, Vice City opted for letting its players live out their most insanely violent, gun-spitting, coke-drenched Scarface fantasies and felt like a cartoon by comparison. An entertaining cartoon, sure, but still a decidedly unrealistic game. Mafia was much more interested in realism: you can only take a few hits without dying, crashing your car too severely will also kill you and the police will get on your tail for running red lights and breaking the speed limit. You can even run out of petrol if you're not careful. The cars are all weighty and feel massive, taking ages to build up speed and with breaking distances measured in hundreds of feet. Mafia's not entirely devoted to realism - a few missions see frankly preposterous numbers of enemies rushing to take you on, because it's still a video game - but it was certainly the cold bucket of water compared to GTA's depiction of crime. It's interesting how influential Mafia was; later GTA games (particularly Grand Theft Auto IV, which borrows a ton of ideas from Mafia) definitely feel more like Mafia than GTA3 or Vice City.

Now the game has been remade by Hanger 13, the developer who took over the franchise from Bohemian Interactive (who also made the disappointing Mafia II). Hanger 13's own Mafia III was so-so, some good ideas compromised by all the tedious open-world jank the publisher had blatantly forced on the game to make it a Grand Theft Auto clone. The fear was they'd do the same to Mafia: Definitive Edition, having the missions trigger when you go to Salieri's restaurant but introducing a ton of new content to make exploring the city worthwhile at the expense of slowing the narrative down. I'm genuinely surprised they haven't done this, instead replicating the original structure of having you move directly from one mission to the next in a linear fashion. The separate "Free Ride" mode remains intact, allowing you to explore the city off your own back if you wish (although there isn't much to do).

The shooting has been upgraded a bit, with the introduction of Mafia III's cover system, but it feels a bit weightless compared to the original game. In particular the machine gun has become decidedly less effective than it used to be and the game's tracking of headshots is variable. The driving hasn't been upgraded at all: these cars are still massive, take ages to get up to speed and cornering becomes a major skill. This is a bold choice, although the developers have added motorbikes and some ahistorical later, nippier cars for optional use. Fortunately there's now a lot more granularity in the difficulty. You can set it so the police ignore you for breaking the speed limit or running red lights, and cars no longer need to be fuelled up.

The story and missions remain the same, although they've been tightened up in places. Tommy has a few more interactions with his girlfriend (and later wife) and the slightly embarrassing sex scene from the original (all comical bumping polygons and dead staring eyes) has been mercifully exorcised in favour of something more tasteful. The script has also been rewritten to be more concise and sharper, leading to one of the game's most disappointing aspects: the revoicing of all the game's dialogue.

This is fine in most cases, with the new actors turning in solid performances. The biggest problem is with Tommy himself. His original voice actor was outstanding, really selling the idea of Tommy as a completely ordinary guy who's wandered into this life and isn't sure about it at all, coming across as believably nervous and even frightened in his first few brushes with "the lifestyle" before he gets more used to it. Tommy in the revised edition has a much more generic voice actor and is a bruiser who is prepared to use his fists and guns right from the very off, with other characters even expressing their surprise at his willingness to use physical violence. This is an odd move, as it removes what differentiated Tommy from other video game antagonists (including Vito and Lincoln in the sequels) and makes him both far more predictable and much less sympathetic. It doesn't help that the new Tommy character model doesn't resemble the original at all (weirdly, as pretty much everyone else gets a brand new model that resembles the original quite closely, just much more detailed) and again looks much more generic.

Graphically, the game is fine, and certainly much better than it looked in 2002, but not as good as you'd expect a brand new game in 2020. The environments look decent and the main character models are solid (especially in cutscenes) but most of the random pedestrians on the street are distinctly plastic-looking and the city buildings have a really weird LOD issue, where they load up the more detailed textures far later than you'd expect, resulting in some distinctly low-res skyscrapers when you're not that far away from them. The game also has some of the same weird physics artefacts from the original (such as some street signs stopping your car in its tracks if you crash it them, but other, near-identical ones being knocked flying). Mafia III was rightfully criticised for being a 2016 game that looked like a 2010 game, but Mafia: Definitive Edition is a 2002 game remade in a 2016 engine that looks like a 2012 game on a good day. The game doesn't look hideous and it gets the job done, but it does feel a bit low-budget.

The original game's most controversial mission, the ludicrously tough motor race, is present and correct, and hysterically appears to be based on the original build version from 2002, not the patch released a few months later which added variable sub-difficulty levels, opened up a cheesy shortcut and even allowed you to skip the mission if you failed it a few times in a row. The 2020 version of the race is lacking any of these improvements and is utterly merciless on anything other than Easy difficulty. Respect to Hanger 13 for retaining the integrity of the original, a bold but (going by early social media reactions) controversial move.

Mafia: Definitive Edition (***½) spruces up an all-time classic into something more approachable and more playable in 2020. It isn't a flawless remake, however. Graphically, it's not where  you'd expect a modern game to be, and the shooting is a bit of a mixed bag. The game feels a bit like it's fallen between two stools: it's changed enough so as not to be a completely 100% accurate remake but it's not changed enough to create an entirely new game sitting on top of the original's structure. As it stands it feels like a compromise, one that's playable and interesting enough, but some of the original magic has been lost along the way. It's also questionable if even the half-price launch point is reasonable considering that a single playthrough of the game will likely not take much more than 12 hours or so. The game is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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.

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).

One of the greatest video games of all time is back on GoG

GoG has been re-releasing a lot of masterpieces from yesteryear recently. They've managed to secure another major coup by releasing the original Mafia in a new form that's readily compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 10.

Mafia, subtitled The City of Lost Heaven in the States, was a game from Illusion Softworks released in 2002. The game saw you play a young man named Tommy Angelo as he moves up from being a cab driver to a high-ranking member of the Lost Heaven mafioso. The game features a long and complex storyline in which Tommy is drawn inch-by-inch into the world of the mafia until he realises what sort of people he's aligned with, at which point he starts looking for a way out.

It's a familiar story, told before, but in this game it is told with tremendous skill, subtlety and atmosphere. The game is remarkable both for its high-octane action set-pieces and slightly comically slow car chases (the game is very true to its simulation of 1920s and 1930s vehicles), but also for its slower moments of characterisation, scoping out targets for heists and scenes of just hanging out and talking to people. Released the same year as the excellent (but extraordinarily dark) Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Mafia got a little lost in the mix but is frankly the far superior game, with less insane mayhem but far more nuance, character and a much better-developed storyline. It's also worth keeping an eye on the cast lists, with actors from both The Sopranos and the then-brand-new The Wire both showing up in surprising numbers.

This new release from GoG has a slight flaw in that the original, licensed music had to be removed from the game. However, there is a fan workaround to restore it available via the GoG Forums.

You can read my original review of Mafia here.

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.

Mafia II

February 1945. Vito Scaletta returns from the war to his home city of Empire Bay. Almost immediately he finds himself drawn into a world of criminals and the mafia, as his best friend uses shady connections to get him released from the service early. As time passes Vito finds himself reaping the rewards from a life of crime...as well as the dangers.

Mafia II is the sequel to the 2002 game Mafia. Mafia is one of my favourite games of all time, with superb writing, tremendous characterisation and some fun shooting mechanics making up for occasionally questionable gameplay (such as that infamously hardcore racing mission). Mafia II is not a direct follow-up, set as it is in a different city with different characters. There are a couple of references to the events of the original Mafia, though these are obtuse enough that only hardcore fans are likely to spot them. Instead, the game's narrative is completely self-contained.

In terms of gameplay, the Mafia series resembles the Grand Theft Auto franchise with driving sections and on-foot combat, with the important difference that the Mafia games are not open-world titles. Instead you proceed directly from one mission directly to the next. This means that the cities do not need to be as exhaustively detailed and brimming with stuff to do as in the GTA titles, since they are merely backdrops to the action (though they are still well-realised). This gives the Mafia games a much greater focus and puts both their stories and characters under much more pressure, as they need to be good for the games to succeed. The GTA games, which a lot of people play purely to cause havoc in the cities without ever looking at the main storylines, don't quite have the same pressure.

This requirement paid off handsomely in the original Mafia. The story of Tommy Angelo's rise from taxi driver to criminal fixer, becoming a made man and gaining a family and respectability before realising how brutal and violent his world had become, was extremely compelling. It featured musings on the corrosive effects of violence on the psyche and on the morality of killing. It was a stronger story than anything to appear in a GTA title (and, interestingly, GTA4 seemed to take more than a few ideas from it).

The personalised number plates are pretty cool.

Unfortunately, it does not pay off in Mafia II. Illusion Softworks - now 2K Czech - were obviously keen not to repeat themselves in this game, so Vito Scaletta's story is rather different to Tommy's. It unfolds over a much shorter span of time (limited to two periods of several months in 1945 and 1951) and is less of the traditional rags-to-riches tale. Vito is a small-time hood who pretty much stays a small-time hood (albeit one who eventually gets a rather nice house) throughout. He doesn't have a relationship or get married, and in fact seems to be rather more sexist than Tommy (the lack of any healthy female relationships in his life and his obsession with collecting Playboy magazines indicates such). He's also a lot dumber, frequently agreeing to shady deals that have, "THIS IS GOING TO GO BADLY WRONG," written all over them.

This in itself is a problem, with Vito's misadventures being less compelling than either Tommy's in the earlier game, or the protagonists of most of the GTA games. A bigger problem is the lack of decent other characters. Aside from Vito's best buddy Joe, none of the other characters in the game gets much of a personality, or motivation. Even keeping track of which criminal is working for which gang is hard work. There is little to no emotional investment in Vito, his story, or in the other characters, which does interfere with caring about the game.

Fortunately, the gameplay is still pretty good. It's similar to Mafia's and the gunplay is even better, helped by that rarest of beasts, a cover system which actually works and adds to the combat experience. There's one oddity in that Mafia limited you to one of each class of weapon whilst Mafia II allows you to carry every weapon at once, making it a rare example of a game that actually gives the player more choice rather than taking it away through limited arsenals. This is a welcome move. Driving is also similar, with the game still being rather less forgiving about things like running red lights, speeding or hit-and-runs than the GTA series. The cops are harder to shake this time around, but you also have more options for losing them, including running into clothes shops to change clothes or offering bribes. The missions are also quite long, with mid-mission checkpoints and a number of plot twists that, whilst usually predictable, keep things ticking over. The graphics are very impressive (especially the lighting; Mafia II may have the best sunrises and sunsets of any game to date, and the way car headlights diffuse in the fog is extremely atmospheric) and the soundtrack is first-rate, with some great (if occasionally anachronistic) tracks from the birth of the rock 'n' roll era.

Ultimately, Mafia II is a far less compelling game than its forebear due to the weaker writing, story and characters. This is annoying as the gameplay is often better, but you have much less reason to care about what's going on. The game is also stingier, with combat sections often being extremely brief and easy. Mafia II has most of the same ingredients as its excellent forebear, but this time around they do not combine into as compelling a game.

Mafia II (***) is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

Wertzone Classics: Mafia

In 1930, Tommy Angelo is a cab driver working in the American city of Lost Heaven when he is 'asked' to help two gangsters, Sam and Paulie, escape from a rival Mafia hit squad. With the rivals now gunning for Tommy as well, he reluctantly accepts the offer of employment with Sam and Paulie's boss, Don Salieri, and begins a life of crime.


Mafia spans a period of eight years and chronicles how Tommy's life takes a dramatic upswing as he becomes a respected - and feared - member of the local community. Tommy enjoys the camaraderie of fighting alongside his fellow mobsters, which he likens to being a soldier in a war, but is also concerned when innocents are harmed in the course of their business. As the years pass, the city grows and changes, more advanced cars come out on the market and Tommy realises his soul is being eroded as the once-romantic vision he had of life as a Mafioso is replaced by the hard, cold reality of a life of brutality, blood and treachery.

Mafia was released in 2002 and dismissed by many as a Grand Theft Auto 3 clone, especially as the X-Box and PS2 ports subsequently released were pretty terrible. However, the PC version of the game remains one of the more underrated titles of the last decade. At first glance, Mafia does resemble the GTA titles: you control a character who goes around a well-realised city, gets into gunfights and is able to use transport such as cars, buses and trams to get around. However, Mafia is very different in both tone and structure. Mafia is much more serious. There are real consequences to running around and mowing civilians down with tommy guns, and the fact that you take injuries if the car crashes or flips over means that high-speed insane stunts are discouraged. The police are also much more on the ball, and will fine you for speeding or running red lights. Whilst you can 'jack' cars on the road, doing so is risky (the offended driver roaring off and dragging you under the wheels is a real danger) and it's not really a core part of the game. The overall idea is that as a member of the Mafia and on the surface a respectable guy you're supposed to be keeping a (relatively) low profile.

Structurally, the game is also different. In the GTA titles it's up to you when you do a mission and you can just drive around and cause random mayhem if you choose. Mafia is primarily mission-based and you move from one story-driven mission to the next with no break to go off and explore the city. As the game progresses, however, you unlock various stages of the 'free ride' mode which loads up as a separate game and allows you to go exploring by yourself if you wish. Completing the entire game opens up the 'free ride extreme' which is similar to the freeform GTA style of gaming, complete with doing various jobs for money.

These elements feel like possible sops by the developer to the publisher, who was perhaps keen to cash in on the "GTA-in-1930!" angle. The heart of the game lies in the story and the story is stellar. Anyone who's seen a Mafia movie or read a Mafia novel will likely predict most of the story turns before they happen, but the plot unfolds with verve, confidence and expert pacing, delivered by exceptional voice acting (fans of The Sopranos and The Wire will spot some familiar voices) and some strong writing. Mafia is, at heart, a study of violence and what turns good men into criminals. It avoids cliches - Tommy is inducted by steps into a life of violence but is never 'seduced' by it or has a "What have I become?" moment of corny realisation - and remains, even on a fourth or fifth replay, a compelling experience.

As with many games with very strong writing and acting, it does impact on the freedom of the player's choices. In particular, it can be a bit odd if Tommy's just been in a two-minute cut scene regretting the innocent people who were harmed in his last job and then he goes out and runs over two old ladies and crashes into a wall. This is a familiar problem with games and given that the alternative - turning the player into a psychopathic nutjob like Tommy Vercetti in Vice City - doesn't entirely work either, not one that's easy to solve. Probably the best thing is to ignore the oddities and get on with the game.

The graphics are still good today, although the somewhat stiff animation is a bit disconcerting ('proper' in-game 3D character animation didn't really take off until Half-Life 2, two and a half years later). At the time of release, however, the graphics were astonishing, literally light-years ahead of the contemporary GTA3 series of games. Whilst they're not as jaw-dropping today, they can now be run on modern PCs with everything switched up to maximum with no problem aside that the viewing distance isn't all that it could be, and buildings pop into existence a bit closer than they should. Sound is also strong, although the music and soundtrack are nowhere near as varied as those of the contemporary GTA games. The handling of vehicles is also excellent, with the cars feeling very solid and heavy, and when they get going they're not going to stop easily. The way new, faster cars are introduced periodically throughout the game and the city changes over time (buildings under construction in one mission are completed in another set three years later) is also well-handled.

On the minus side, there are a number of niggles which deny the game flawless status. The quantity of cut scenes in the game is very high, exceeding 400 pages of dialogue, and although it's excellently acted and well-written, having to skip through it once you've seen it once can be annoying. Also, the save system saves the game before the cut scenes, not after them, meaning that replaying missions can involve a lot of irritated hitting of the space bar at the start. And whilst the cops being more on the ball than their Liberty City/Vice City/San Andreas State counterparts is initially very impressive, there are times when you wish you could take off the speed-limiter and go roaring through the city at 120mph without worrying about hearing police sirens in the distance. Finally, the fourth mission involves you have to take part in a motor race which is insanely difficult. Seriously, I know people who've given up on the game in disgust at how tough this mission is. Luckily, the later patches introduce a difficulty meter for the level which makes it much simpler, so this is no longer such an issue.

Mafia (*****) is a very strong, compelling and even literate computer game which is more than just a meaningless exercise in violence and mayhem. It has some interesting and intelligent themes going on, but is also a highly playable action title. It is available now on the PC (UK, USA). The far inferior PS2 (UK, USA) and X-Box (UK, USA) ports are also available. A sequel, Mafia II, which picks up on the world in a new city with different characters ten years later, will be released on the PC, X-Box 360 and PS3 at the end of the year.