In his review of 2K Games’ Mafia III, Miklós suggested only picking the game up when it’s massively discounted, or if “you have very little else to play”, but I’m sure some of you ignored this sage advice and grabbed the game anyway. If you’re one of those people, it might interest you to know that the game’s third DLC drop isn’t too far off, and it looks legitimately interesting.
2K Games’ Mafia III received a less-than-stellar score in Miklós’ review, where he explained that “it’s not TERRIBLE, but it’s not particularly great either”. But hey, you’ll never really know if you like something unless you give it a try, which is exactly what the game’s free demo will let you do.
If you happen to really enjoy the game, you’ll be happy to know that its first big expansion is out today. Trailers for the demo and the DLC below.
It’s difficult to believe that Civilization V launched six years ago. In that time we’ve seen more CODs, Assassin’s Creeds, Next Big Thing indie games, and craft beer festivals than what any sane person could consider reasonable. During that period, Firaxis released three major titles across its set of studios: Civilization: Beyond Earth, XCOM, and its sequel XCOM 2. If there’s anything you should realise from this, it’s that the people at Firaxis like to take their time, and the feature-loaded Civilization VI is testament to that.
Mafia III is not a very good game. It’s almost a good game, but it never quite manages to wrench itself out of mediocrity. This is a pity considering the game’s location and time period. You play as Lincoln Clay, an African American returning home to New Orleans after doing service in Vietnam. Upon returning home to his adopted family, the New Orleans black mob, Lincoln crosses paths with the Marcano mafia family. As can be expected, things soon go belly up and Lincoln is thrust into a revenge narrative that treads familiar video game grounds.
It’s 1968, so New Orleans is a muggy pot of racism and crime. The game is prefaced by a big warning that it contains all sorts of racism in order to remain authentic to this particular period in American Deep South history. You can expect copious derogatory words for basically any character that isn’t a white American. Sadly, there’s never really any deeper tackling of race issues, and even protagonist Lincoln Clay remains obstinately in the one-dimensional, revenge-fuelled character camp. It’s a great pity, because I can count on one hand the amount of times we’ve been presented with a AAA title with a person of colour as the lead character. There’s this enormous space to tell a story with thematic layers of racial identity and prejudice, but Mafia III never seems brave enough to jump in with both feet; it sort of splashes around the shallow end, never getting itself completely immersed in sensitive subject matter that would have quite successfully buoyed the game up and out of the “just another GTA clone” realms of thought.
With roughly three weeks to go until the launch of Mafia III, 2K Games has unveiled what your PC will need under the hood to run it. Fortunately, making a Sicilian-style pledge to The Family while a painting of the Virgin Mary watches isn’t on the list (I’ve seen too many mobster movies).