My review of Mafia 3

I bought this at release for the Xbox One, and have finally gotten around to completing it.

First off I want to say that as much as I enjoyed it, I wouldn’t recommend buying it right now, wait for the updates etc then see how you feel, or wait for it to be on sale. For all its faults though, it’s still a decent game. The mission structure reminds me a lot of The Godfather games, I enjoyed those games, but I realise they’re not for everyone. You have to remember that this is the first game by this development company, it’s very very rare for a new development team to get EVERYTHING right first time. They have done a lot of things right though.

Pros;

Story is great, very rich story, thoroughly enjoyed it.
The way the story is presented is really nicely done.
Sounds fantastic.
Music choice is brilliant, first time since GTA Vice City that I’ve stayed in the car to listen to the rest of the song before going to complete my objective.
Overrall design of the city feels good.

Cons;

There is some textural strangeness from time to time.
Mission structure outside of the story focused missions is pretty repetitive.
It is missing quite a few of the little things that made Mafia 2 great, such as speed limiter, fuel, car washes etc. (Changing clothes, customising vehicles, storing vehicles. These are supposed to be added in through free updates down the road, so I’ll bracket this small list for now)

I am looking forward to the coming updates and the DLC for it, hopefully they will have a more varied mission structure. Given that the updates will also include the ability to change clothing, and customise vehicles, it might help to mix things up a bit.

This is the first game for this development company, so I do still have faith that for their next game they’ll take the feedback from this game onboard and make some good improvements.

Should they go down the route of another Mafia game in the future, they’ve shown that they can make a good story, so perhaps set it during another decade (eg. 70’s/80’s Miami) even with your stereotypical/standard Scarface type plot, I feel like they could do a great storyline that does differ slightly from the norm. There’s also a hell of a lot of great songs from those decades, so they’d have a field day on the soundtrack!