\n<\/p>\n
O<\/span>nce upon a time, the industry was drowning in games like this. Single-player, story-led action experiences with a weekend\u2019s worth of choreographed set pieces and an open world glazed with a fine mist of collectibles \u2026 But here in 2025, the age of the Battle Pass and live service forever games, Hangar 13\u2019s solo adventure about Sicilian crime families feels almost as dated as its 1900s setting.<\/p>\n In fact, The Old Country has few new ideas to contribute to the cover shooter genre, nor to the Mafia series itself. Hangar 13 already produced a remake in 2020 of the original Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, but in this game it often feels like the studio\u2019s remaking it yet again in a different setting. Both the storyline and structure of its individual missions seem to be at the very least giving a reverential nod of the fedora to that 2002 title.<\/p>\n <\/span>You can see where this is going \u2026 Mafia: The Old Country.<\/span> Photograph: 2K Games<\/p>\n Case in point: the \u201cwin a race to impress your Don\u201d mission trope. This chapter was infamous in the original Mafia because the 1930s race cars were extremely hard to handle and the race was all but unwinnable, but it was also a sophisticated multi-stage mission structure full of sabotage, theft and unexpected double-crossings. Mafia: The Old Country simply has you riding out to a town where a race is due to take place, then tells you the Don needs a replacement rider and drops you into the saddle for an uneventful canter around a course that features no real challenge. Ten years ago, such a by-the-numbers experience would have been criticised, but right now the scarcity of games like this means you\u2019re inclined to look past the basic mission design and enjoy its strongest assets instead: its story, and its sense of time and place.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 1904 and you are Enzo Favara, an unfortunate young man with no family to speak of who finds himself working down in the sulphur mines with his fellow carusi<\/em> in their yellow-stained rags and shaven heads. After working conditions at the mine tip past horrific and into fatal, Enzo stands up to his sadistic employers and makes a powerful enemy in Don Ruggero Spadaro, the local \u201cbusinessman\u201d who owns the mine. Not to worry, though \u2013 after fleeing, he\u2019s taken in by Don Torrisi, a rival of Spadaro\u2019s, who appreciates the young man\u2019s bravery and work ethic. You can see where this is going.<\/p>\n <\/span>Rich setting \u2026 Mafia: The Old Country.<\/span> Photograph: 2K Games<\/p>\n What follows is your typical ascendancy through the ranks of a crime family, expressed through the medium of knife fights and old timey shootouts, in the era when reloading a pistol takes three to five days. Local businesses refuse to pay up. Workers go on strike. Bandits and rival families threaten your reputation. You journey to a locale that\u2019s conveniently littered with waist-high cover, hunker down and set to them.<\/p>\n In fairness to Enzo and his associates, missions aren\u2019t always about all-out violence. At times you\u2019re sneaking around, distracting guards by throwing coins and bottles to lure them away from your path. There\u2019s a lot of riding horses and driving cars and plenty of expository chat to deepen the context of your actions either side of the fracas. These mechanics outside combat are not especially exciting, but this is a mafia game. It\u2019s not trying to be a deep, systems-laden experience \u2013 it just wants to tell you a gangster story.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n And by the skin of its teeth, it succeeds in that endeavour. But it does so via premise rather than plot. The beats are predictable. The memorable moments aren\u2019t clever lines of dialogue or dramatic denouements, but vivid historical details. Pheasants strung up in pantries, baskets of citrus fruit piled high in fields. Workers stamping on grapes in the Torrisi vineyard. Historically accurate recipes for spezzatino di maiale on kitchen counters. The Sicilian dialect peppered throughout each conversation (I heartily recommend going all-in and changing to Sicilian audio localisation with English subtitles). Here is a game that has done its research, and brought to life a geographical and historical setting previously unvisited by games. And done it so well that it proves to be Mafia: The Old Country\u2019s saving grace.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Pushing Buttons<\/span><\/p>\n Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to make the case that its knife fights and shootouts are anything more than functional, and its missions feel slightly too straightforward to befit a franchise once known for its sublime changes of pace. But even with those caveats in mind, it\u2019s still absolutely worth playing for the richness of its setting, and the infectious enthusiasm it has for its grim subject matter.<\/p>\n Mafia: The Old Country is out now, \u00a349.99<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once upon a time, the industry was drowning in games like this. Single-player, story-led action experiences with a weekend\u2019s worth of choreographed set pieces and an open world glazed with a fine mist of collectibles \u2026 But here in 2025, the age of the Battle Pass and live service forever games, Hangar 13\u2019s solo adventure<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16023,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[919,9476,1973,9477,413,378,9475,2221,1085,1228,9478],"class_list":{"0":"post-16022","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-action","9":"tag-bynumbers","10":"tag-country","11":"tag-elevated","12":"tag-game","13":"tag-games","14":"tag-mafia","15":"tag-period","16":"tag-review","17":"tag-setting","18":"tag-sicilian"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}