Mafia: The Old Country Review - An Offer You Can't Excuse
One hour into Mafia: The Old Country and I’ve escaped from a collapsing sulphur mine, stabbed a mean guy in the face, and participated in a horse racing tournament for the glory of the local Don. So, you might call that a successful Sunday afternoon.
Hangar 13’s Mafia: The Old Country has a lot riding on it. Aside from the rather excellent remake of the first game from 2020, it’s been nine years since we last had a new title in the series, and The Old Country’s rather bold idea of going back to a much earlier time in history might just have paid off.
Mafia: The Old Country takes you back further than the series has gone before, to early 1900s Sicily, Italy. When young labourer Enzo Favara finds himself in the servitude of the Torrisi crime family, he becomes determined to do whatever it takes to work up the ranks and carve out a better life for himself. What ensues is a 10-15 hour story where Enzo does jobs for the mafia, makes friends and enemies along the way, while also trying to keep his head above water in a dog-eat-dog world.
Enzo is joined by several strong supporting characters throughout the game, including Luca, an underboss for the family, and Cesare, the nephew of Don Torrisi. There’s also Isabella, the Don’s daughter whom Enzo harbours secret romantic feelings for. If you’ve ever seen a mafia movie, you can probably guess where this is going. And it’s pretty clear that Hangar 13’s writers have taken great care to make these characters worth rooting for. Enzo is a genuinely likeable guy, and the story takes effort into showing why he’s cut clear from his peers.
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And as any historian can tell you, the Sicilian Mafia were generally not nice people, an aspect of Mafia: The Old Country that Hangar 13 definitely doesn’t shy away from. There are some characters you’ll encounter who you’ll grow to despise, and others who you come to understand are good people under the surface, but have had to do bad things in order to adapt to a dangerous life. It strikes an excellent balance between presenting the reality of 1900s Sicily with the complexity of writing characters you want to root for.
It's great, but Don Torrisi feels like the weakest link here. His role in the story is that of a mafia boss trying to keep his family together in the face of adversity, but he comes across as a bit of a genre cliché. it doesn't help that a lot of his lines feel recycled from The Godfather, resulting in a rather odd Vito Corleone impression. It ended up taking me out of the story, rather than helping me lean in, whenever he showed up.
With Mafia: The Old Country being set in the 1900s, many gameplay aspects have been changed to better fit the time period. With it being set around 20 years before cars became affordable for both consumers and manufacturers, your main mode of transportation, at least in the opening hours of the game, is done through horse riding. While the movement and animations aren’t as fluid as something like, say, Red Dead Redemption, it certainly feels like Hangar 13 did its best to make horse controls satisfying. Considering you’ll be spending a large portion of your playthrough riding these things, it’s good to see that they’re not just “cars with legs”, but that they actually feel unique from driving automobiles.
Once you do get access to driving, I also appreciated that the cars have a lot of weight to them. They don’t go very fast, nor are they easy at making sharp turns, but the physics feels authentic for the time. These cars don’t feel floaty or streamlined to drive, and you can feel the weight behind any collisions you make. Considering Sicily is made up of many winding roads and steep hills, driving in itself becomes a bit of a challenge.
As for the combat, it relies more on knives and handguns as opposed to stronger weaponry. The melee combat in particular has seen a rather large overhaul. It doesn’t incentivise button mashing anymore, but instead becomes more of a puzzle where you need to read an enemy’s stance, and then parry, dodge, slash, or thrust depending on their next move. It’s a lot more difficult, so you really have to pay attention to how to approach each fight if you want to win it. This is an aspect of Mafia: The Old Country that feels like one of the more impressive changes over the earlier games, as it turns combat into feeling more like a memorable event rather than just another fight.
But if you’d rather keep your hands clean, there are also quite a few stealth missions in the game. And unfortunately, some of these sections force you into being stealthy with no alternative. You know the type—missions where you need to sneak around an enemy base without being caught. You can take out as many dudes as you want, go pretty much wherever you need to be, but don’t you dare get caught and raise the alarm, because you’ll instantly fail the mission and be sent back to the last checkpoint.
Thankfully, this isn’t the case with every stealth mission in Mafia: The Old Country, and there are still a lot of missions which can “go loud” if you get caught, but it astounds me that Hangar 13 thinks auto-fail stealth sections have any place in a game released in 2025.
To help you get through these levels, there’s an “Instinct Mode” which basically works like the mechanic from the Hitman series, or Batman Arkham Asylum’s Detective Vision. Holding down a button down reveals enemy locations through walls and floors in the form of faint silhouettes. It’s supposed to help you with getting your bearings when sneaking around a restricted area, but I’m not too keen on this. Half the fun of a stealth game is adapting to enemy movement patterns, and then working out a plan of action should you accidentally bump into someone. I think it just makes things unnecessarily easier, and it cheapens the novelty of the stealth section.
We tested this game on PC, and unfortunately, it does suffer from a bit of stutter. Interior areas are fine, they hit framerates at 60FPS and above pretty easily. However, going outside or into busy areas, you'll quickly find framerates to drop rather dramatically. There was even a cutscene in San Celeste where the FPS hit single-digits. I’m not going to point fingers at any one cause here. It could be Unreal Engine 5 jank, or it could be that my PC is aging a little (I have a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 3070, which isn’t top-of-the-line brand new anymore, but it’s still quite beefy for its age). We could not test this game on console, so it may be better or worse there, but just be aware that PC users may run into some slowdowns depending on their hardware.
As I mentioned before, Mafia: The Old Country’s story is only around 10-15 hours, depending on your activities. It’s technically an open-world, in that you can drive across a large map based on 1900s Sicily, but I would be hesitant to call it an “open-world game”. There aren’t really any major activities to do, and you also never really spend any time with the freedom to explore outside of missions. It seems like a bit of a waste, as you have this beautiful open world to explore, and nothing to actually do in it. It’s also a very linear storyline, keeping you on the beaten path for almost its entire playtime. If you think back to the linearity of the first two Mafia games, it’s closer to that in terms of scale as opposed to Mafia 3. You can unlock a bonus "Explore Mode" which lets you drive around Sicily without any objectives, but again, with nothing to really do, it's not a huge timesink.
Still, the linearity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I’ve always been a big advocate for the 10-15 hour linear experience, and it’s good to see that Hangar 13 has also been given the tools to do exactly this. It doesn’t reek of publisher pressure to try and hamfist in some miscellaneous side quests or bonus activities, as seen in GTA or Assassin’s Creed, which I believe to be a good thing. Instead, you get to just enjoy a short to medium-length story at a steady pace. And considering the game is only being sold for £44.99 too, the expectation of a shorter length is also there.
Some small annoyances aside, Mafia: The Old Country is a great entry to the long-running series, and it’s done a fine job at adapting the formula to a brand new historical context. It does run the risk of alienating long-time fans, as the jump back in time makes it quite an adjustment. However, if you just let it tell the story it wants to, you’ll find it can match the quality you've come to expect from this series.
Pros: Great story and characters, innovative gameplay, beautiful world
Cons: Some genre clichés, performance issues, poor mission design
For fans of: The Godfather, GTA, Red Dead Redemption
7/10: Very Good
Mafia: The Old Country is out on 7th August on PC (version tested), PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.