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Mafia iii reviews9/12/2023 ![]() While you won’t run into trouble in the bayous or the predominantly minority-populated neighborhoods, expanding out into the more affluent realms of New Bordeaux means dealing with much more than increased difficulty. When you look like Lincoln Clay, simply existing is a challenge unto itself. Walk around, and you will hear slurs tossed about more often then you see the words “bae” or “fleek” in the current age. It was a world where a man like Lincoln Clay could fight for his nation overseas only to be treated like less than a second class citizen when he returned to the home country that didn’t want him. Riots by a people long overlooked were met with violence from those who sought to oppress them. had recently been gunned down for being virtuous in a time of contempt. Mafia III takes place in America during the 1960’s, a time when racism was a ingrained norm. What follows is a quest for revenge that sets the entire city of New Bordeaux ablaze. After a happy reunion with old friends, now members of the Black Mob and the Italian Mafia, it appears that things are looking up for everyone - until betrayal sets in, leaving the Black Mob decimated. Players step into the battleworn boots of Lincoln Clay, a bi-racial war orphan and veteran who stops fighting for his country overseas only to fight for the right to exist in his very home of New Bordeaux (Hanger 13’s fictional take on a 1960’s New Orleans). Thankfully, Hanger 13’s latest manages to achieve this goal, though it does stumble a bit along the way. How to stand up tall and appealing without just playing it by the numbers. Releasing in a post GTA V world, Mafia III had to figure out how to do the same. They were different takes on what make open-world games so captivating without copying the tried and true formula of the biggest name in the genre. The second game changed things even further, serving up a much more linear narrative in its open world. Instead of being filled with diversions and tons of civilians to kill, you got speeding tickets and roamed around looking at historic sites. The first game of the series presented an open world, crime-riddled adventure that took a distinct approach compared to its competition (Grand Theft Auto). There's upside here for gangster film fans, who will doubtless enjoy the ride, but hardcore gamers will find it unsatisfying.Mafia III had some big shoes to fill from the moment it was announced. It’s still a good game, but too much of the time it feels like a very long film to which some incidental gameplay has been added. Mafia III fails to live up to its promise as a genre-beater. Graphically, Mafia III impresses - it has loads of authentic late-60s atmosphere (enhanced by some great radio stations), and the care that has been put into designing a plausible, geographically diverse and huge city shines through. The story is absorbing, conveyed by some great cut-scenes which do, however, take up much more of your play-time than is normal in this day and age. ![]() Lincoln Clay makes use of a decent stealth engine (although the dumber-than-a-bag-of-hammers AI makes it far too easy to attract individual enemies and take them out) and the cover-shooting mechanic is similarly well-constructed. It’s a real shame that structurally, Mafia III feels so regimented, since many aspects of the game are top-notch. The random occurrences and memorable, multi-stage missions that form the life-blood of GTA are completely absent from Mafia III. It takes an age, for example, before side-missions begin to appear on the map, and when they do they're very prosaic, such as picking up bundles of marijuana dropped from planes and driving them in a truck to one of your warehouses. Given the type of game Mafia III is, comparisons with Grand Theft Auto are inevitable, and the latter feels much more free-form, open-world and varied. The trouble is it all feels terribly formulaic. Through all this there’s a cash-raising mechanic which requires you to generate a large amount of money from your burgeoning crime empire before you have enough of a float to take on Marcano. Then, when you flush the bosses out, you can either take them out or spare them and press them into use as your lieutenants. Once the narrative settles down, a pattern quickly emerges: you must disrupt the operations of whichever underboss you’re going after - such as a prostitution operation and brothel run by the Dixie gang, or a union extortion racket run by the Irish. It's when he starts setting that plan into action that the game begins in earnest. After recovering, Clay vows to exact revenge by becoming the city’s crime overlord, picking off the men who profited from his betrayal one by one, taking over their operations and working up to Marcano.
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