Written by: Rik
Date posted: October 9, 2024

Last year, I finally watched The Sopranos. It is, like most people agree, a very good TV show. Quite why I avoided it for so long, I’m not sure, but my main reference point for Mafia tales until then was not any of the famous mob movies, most of which I haven’t seen either, but comic references and parodies like The Simpsons’ Fat Tony. Put it this way: I might have been one of the only people to watch The Sopranos with a silly Hugh Grant romcom in mind, losing any credit that I might otherwise have earned as I belatedly caught up with an award-winning television series by mentally referring to major characters as ‘another bloke from Mickey Blue Eyes’ and scurrying off to Wikipedia to confirm.

I’ve left Illusion Softworks’ Mafia on the shelf for a similarly lengthy period: it’s one of those boxed games that I unwrapped from its cellophane a few years ago, many years after purchase, only for it to refuse to load for unspecified reasons, thereby zapping any momentum (beyond snapping up a digital copy as a potential solution for that unspecified point in the future when the urge to play it might strike again). It’s not otherwise especially similar to The Sopranos, being set in the 1930s, although I guess all Mafia stories have something in common, in that they rarely tell a tale of organised crime being a load of consequence-free fun, with no long-term complications for anyone involved.

In that respect, Mafia is no different, and as we join our protagonist, Tommy Angelo, he’s shown meeting a police detective in a restaurant, looking to tell his story and for a way out in return. Tommy had started out as an honest guy, he explains, working as a cab driver in the fictional city of Lost Heaven, until he accidentally got caught up in a snafu between rival mob factions and found himself with little option but to start working for the people he helped, the Salieri family.

An initial taxi mission introduces the geography of the city, although thankfully for the more navigationally challenged amongst us, a live map can be accessed at any point by pressing the tab key. At this point, you also become accustomed to the fact that the cars of the 1930s can’t be thrown about with the same kind of abandon as the modern vehicles of Grand Theft Auto, which you may either come to see as part of the charm of the period setting, or an annoying idiosyncrasy. If it’s the latter, then the rest of the game ahead may contain many further moments of frustration, but I personally found some enjoyment in wrestling with these ancient machines and keeping them within safe limits under pressure.

Speaking of which, we may as well now address the issue of an early racing mission (Mission 5 – Fairplay) that was infamously difficult upon release. As Tommy, you’re required to act as a substitute racing driver and win a lap-based race that the rest of the mob have a lot of money riding on. Whatever issues existed back in 2002, they appear to have been fixed in the modern GOG release that I played, which even allows you to specify a difficulty level for the race before you start: having heeded previous warnings, I chickened out and selected the ‘Very Easy’ option, felt guilty for breezing through it, and then had another go at the ‘Medium’ setting, which still presented few problems. I may be the best god-damn street racer FFG has ever seen, but I rather think that subsequent tweaks, rather than my own prowess, was the reason for my success.

Strangely, once you’ve got your head around the clunky handling in the early stages, you’ll rarely need to demonstrate a similar level of skill behind the wheel during the rest of the game. At some point in the opening stages, a character informs you that most of the cops in Lost Heaven have been bought off, which is another way of explaining that the police are generally a low profile presence. While you may well attract their attention by speeding or going through a red light, stopping shortly afterwards to accept a ticket makes the problem go away. Persistent outlaw capering does increase the pressure somewhat, but it’s all a far cry from the system of wanted levels in GTA, and it’s rare that you’ll accidentally get into a quickly escalating situation from which there is no escape.

As if to emphasise the point, a quick press of the F5 key enables a speed limiter on your vehicle to prevent you from exceeding 40 mph. The downside is, of course, that you have to take your time while this is engaged, but there’s something vaguely soothing about pootling around in an old car, taking in the sights and enjoying the game’s period-appropriate music (excised from the current digital releases for copyright reasons, but easy enough to restore through semi-illicit means) as you pass through each area of the city.

If driving is pretty much a case of getting from A to B, rather slowly, then free-form open-world antics are also in short supply. There is a series of optional car-stealing missions to undertake for Luca Bertone, a local mechanic, but other than that, you follow the main story structure to the letter. After a short briefing in the Salieri bar, you head outside to pick up a weapon from your colleague Vincenzo, and a new vehicle from stammering mechanic Ralphie, and get down to business.

(Weapons don’t carry over from mission to mission, while any pursuit of the Luca Bertone side missions will likely give you access to better cars than whatever Ralphie has to offer. With both Ralphie and Bertone, the conceit is that they both teach you how to steal a particular model of car, in theory then making it available to you out in the wider world of Lost Heaven. I quite liked the idea of locking off the better vehicles early on, although with a couple of exceptions, you don’t ever really need to steal a car during a mission, and a whole garage of available motors remains available to you at the start of each one. I don’t recall worrying too much about what I was driving at any point.)

The ‘business’ in question is usually, as you might expect, some kind of third-person shootout. It’s an altogether more considered and polished affair than the frantic marionette fun-show of early-00s GTA titles, leaving you much less likely to get away with a somewhat flukey or accidental execution of the mission objectives, but also offering additional checkpoint saves along the way, cutting down on repetition of sections already beaten. The missions themselves generally feel like an action game that exists almost independently from the driving that preceded them, and it’s nice to not have to worry about restarting from scratch and hurrying through the bits that you’ve done already – not least actually getting to the mission start – each time you mess up.

That said, the combat sections can still be tricky. Illusion Softworks previously brought us Hidden and Dangerous, a rock-solid WWII squad-shooter (the disc for which I have kept for more than 20 years and across several house moves, despite having no intention of ever using it again), and there are times when you feel like you’re bungling through the battlefield rather than engaging in some tight third-person combat. At times the visuals call to mind Max Payne, and there are moments when the action feels as if it needs some kind of gimmick to bend the odds in your favour, but sadly, although you have a couple of dives at your disposal, there’s no slo-mo shootdodging on offer here.

Baddies have a habit of hiding and waiting for you to come through a door before blasting you to oblivion, and there’s also the very 2002-era issue of omnipotent snipers in more open outdoor areas. Guns and stocks of ammo are limited in a way that suggests calmness and precision are key ingredients of the gameplay, but both remain curiously just out of reach, with era-appropriate slow reloads and wobbly targeting undermining my own efforts to do anything other than blunder to the next checkpoint, aided by a decent slice of luck, throughout. Occasionally, your two Salieri buddies, Paulie and Sam, join you in combat, but if either one perishes, it’s game over, so there are also moments when you find yourself trying to figure out how to stop them charging into certain danger as well as how on earth you’re going to survive and complete the mission.

Signposting is an occasional issue, particularly when you do have a bit of freedom to explore, and where to go or what to do next doesn’t seem particularly clear. And there are some glitches, too: during one mission at an airfield I was running (and driving) around like a maniac wondering what I’d missed, convinced that the game must have suffered a bug but not quite able to face restarting and once again chewing through all of the action that had led me up to that point. In desperation (and frustration) I decided to shoot what looked like an innocent bystander loitering motionless next to a tree, only to find that he was actually the last baddie on the map, with his death unlocking the next cutscene.

The accompanying story is well presented, although slightly by-the-numbers: the bulk of the game involves an ongoing turf war with the Morello family, who are presented as the dishonourable side of the Lost Heaven Mafia, until it later transpires that perhaps the Salieris are not above similar shenanigans themselves. The earnestness of your character, Tommy, takes a while to wear off, and he is seemingly still shocked at having to kill people, or steal things (and indeed by the very fact that his actions have consequences) well into the second half of the game.

I’ve mentioned Grand Theft Auto a few times already, and – like those bands that always denied being part of a scene that they were most definitely a part of – I’m sure that Mafia would not necessarily consider itself a GTA-alike, but given that it involves a series of missions in which you drive to a place, do a crime, and then drive away again, some overlap has to be acknowledged. In some respects, the greater focus on the core action and story here, as well as a more supportive saving system, does make for a slightly more straightforward experience, and at times that feels like a relief. However, during this era, some part of GTA’s appeal and success owed something to its variety and chaos: even if the series didn’t offer the best driving, or the best third-person combat, around, there were enough different things to see and do that meant you didn’t necessarily focus too closely on, or become overly frustrated by, any flaws.

However, Mafia‘s third-person combat, in particular, feels like it wants to be polished and precise, but still ends up being quite clunky and unforgiving. If you’re no good at it, there’s no going off to get a bigger weapon, or trying a few side-missions instead: it’s a case of reloading at the last checkpoint and starting again. And, as previously noted, the slow pace of the driving might not necessarily be for everyone: it’s one thing to take some time to enjoy the city while you’re driving to a mission, quite another when you’re making your escape, impatient to return to base and get the game saved.

Credit should be given for avoiding some of the cheap thrills associated with causing trouble in an open-world environment, with civilians and police largely kept out of harm’s way throughout. During one (quite annoying) side-mission for Luca Bertone, during which you are tasked with getting rid of a car by driving it into the sea (which you can’t actually do because Tommy puts the handbrake on before he gets out, meaning you have to park it up and ram it from behind with another car, while hoping you don’t accidentally follow it into the water yourself) I ran into some trouble with the police and ended up shooting a couple of officers before completing my mission. Even though there were no in-game consequences for murdering two policemen, it still felt messy, and like I had done a bad job: that wasn’t how it was supposed to go, I told myself, as I drove twitchily back to Luca’s garage.

Mafia was remade from the ground up and released as Mafia: Definitive Edition in 2020. Without getting into the issue of modern remakes – and there was clearly sufficient demand to justify the creation of such a product – I’m not sure that this original version ever left me with a strong feeling that it would be a candidate for an up-to-date makeover. Nothing in the story, or indeed any individual mission, ever really felt like it was going to linger too long in the memory.

Perhaps that’s partly a function of playing it so long after release, although with recent experience of its contemporary titles under my belt, Mafia still seems somewhat of a mixed bag. I definitely struggled with some of the less-forgiving shooting missions while calling it – and myself – a few unpleasant names in the process (although checkpoints are welcome, they certainly don’t eliminate the need to repeat some lengthy and difficult sections). However, I did come away with some broadly positive feelings about the experience, most of which seemed to be associated with its less action-packed segments.

The penultimate mission, for example, involves an extended train ride around the city: a strange brake on momentum, perhaps, but also one that precedes a bloody shootout with high stakes. If a life of organised crime essentially means that you’re doomed, living on borrowed time, and with the end never more than a couple of mistakes away, then perhaps it’s appropriate that Mafia takes its time between missions, with a few minutes exploring the city in a creaky car a way of making space for some moments of deliberation and reflection.

That might, I admit, be an odd way to end a review of a driving and shooting game from 2002. If I had to put a number on what it all adds up to (which I do) then we have that at the top of the page, too. [Taps mic] But, hey, speaking of slightly strange and possibly unsatisfying endings, here’s my take on the last episode of The Sopranos, and what it all meant – what it *really* meant – to those of us who actually understood the show… [Cut! – Ed.]