Pros
- a solid remake of the first game
- fantastic characters in all three games
- three beautiful period pieces
Cons
- Mafia 2 tendsPros
- a solid remake of the first game
- fantastic characters in all three games
- three beautiful period pieces
Cons
- Mafia 2 tends to crash randomly
- in order to change language and dub for Mafia 2 you have to change the language of your Playstation system
- Mafia 3 is a stain on the franchise gameplay wise
The original Mafia was the first game I ever completed as a child. So there was a lot of fear going into the remake of my most nostalgic game. A fear that was mostly unsubstantiated.
The Mafia remake is flawed, yet beautiful. It enhances the storytelling of the original, polishes off the graphics, adds cover mechanics and brings more period specific music. The movement feels clunky, some of the missions were gutted (the port section of You Lucky Bastard) and the guns feel less accurate. Overall though, it is a fine remake of one of the most solid stories in gaming.
I love Mafia 2. I don't like this version of Mafia 2. Normally, this is a solid game that tells a fantastic story with an ambiguous ending. Vito is a fun character and the depictions of the Mafia lifestyle is fun to witness. But whoever coded this remaster majorly messed up. The game randomly crashes, memory leaks and overall feels a lot worse than its original release. Plus the insult to injury of being forced to change my entire Playstation systems language in order to get the Czech dub is just stupid.
Then comes Mafia 3. Ok, the story, and what I mean is the cutscenes are great. They look good to this day and are acted fantastically. The issue is that they are held hostage behind the most mindless gameplay imaginable. Assassin's Creed II collecting feathers levels of annoying and mind numbing. This game genuinely takes Ubisoft's side content collectibles and uses them to lock away the main story missions, until you do enough of them in a specific district that it unlocks the main mission. That is garbage. But wait, you have to do that nine times, for each part of the town separately. Ugh…
What does not help is the gunplay. It feels extremely floaty and uninspired. Hide behind cover, line dot with head, press shoot, shoot over cover, headshot, next enemy, repeat. That is the level of gunplay we are talking about.
Also, funny thing. This game came out in 2016. Three years after GTA V and one year after Witcher 3. The open world aspect of Mafia 3 is hilarious when compared to these. The city is beyond dead. The only activity open to you is tuning up your cars a little. That is it. Other than that, it is to drive two minutes to an uninspired Assassin's Creed style objective, engage in the most boring gunplay in the world, drive three minutes to the same objective and repeat and repeat and repeat. Hour later you unlock an uninspired main mission that hides the cool story with the solid cutscenes. Do that nine times.
So, when looking at this collection, you get a solid remake of a game from 2002, a broken remaster that spits on the legacy of the fantastic original and you also get a game that was never good. I don't know about you, but that does not sound like a good deal to me.… Expand
