Mafia III has a gripping tale about racism in 1968, but bugs and weak gameplay hold it back

What you won’t like

Gameplay isn’t as fun as it could be

Above: Clay in the bayou Mafia III.

Image Credit: 2K Games

Yes, I am both praising the combat and criticizing it at the same time. I don’t mean to be overly critical of Mafia III, but I think that this game came really close to being outstanding, and it was marred by technical and gameplay flaws. Gameplay flaws are a big problem for a lot of players, and it depends what kind of person you are in terms of putting up with them or taking a pass on this title.

Once in a while, I experienced a good combat scene, like when thugs stormed Thomas Burke’s junkyard compound and Clay had to defend it with machine guns and sniper rifles. But that’s more of the exception. More often, I would get really close to someone, they would point a gun at me, and the gun would go right through my character. I’d find a nice way to sneak into a compound, but the door wouldn’t open.

Most of the time, I followed a formula in taking out a group of enemies who were protecting a boss. I’d hide, whistle, and slit the throats of the outlying guards. Then, I would open fire at some point or just get discovered. Next, I would shoot until my guns were empty or call in a hit squad to help me. This wasn’t a fundamentally fun cycle. The enemies were pretty dumb, standing in the open. But if I stood in the open, I would get shot and restart the whole firefight. This is once again the curse of the open world. If you’re going to have combat a few hundred times, it’s very hard to make each sequence fun.

Lots of minor bugs

Car doors open and go through the person opening the door. A plate of food floats above a table, rather than sitting on it. When you call two cars over for a delivery, one car will sometimes crash into the back of another car. It’s comical but annoying when one of the cars hits and injures Clay. Each one of these bugs chips away at the story’s immersion.

I also encountered design flaws. I wandered around for hours because I didn’t realize that I had an unfinished objective. (You can see objectives by doing the obscure act of opening the map and hitting X.) I had to go find garbage barges and sink them around the city. But they weren’t marked, and I didn’t know where to find them. If the developers had at least put an indicator on the map to show their locations, I could have saved myself hours of wandering blindly.

Occasional crashes

Above: Car chases are a big part of Mafia III.

Image Credit: 2K Games

The game just quit in the middle of high-speed chases about 20 times. That was annoying, but it picked back up at the previous checkpoint. I learned to live with it, sadly. The long load times when you restart were very annoying. Fortunately, I never lost any progress that was really important. But I sure lost a lot of time restarting the game.

Unfinished graphics and A.I.

Above: Robotic thugs in Mafia III.

Image Credit: 2K

When you take over a territory, Clay calls an underboss to send henchmen out to claim the place. When they come over in cars, all 12 of them get out and walk exactly the same way. It’s like they’re robots. Their feet slide across the ground, rather than step over it. You get the feeling that somebody on the development team failed to notice this and send it back to the artist or person responsible for that slice of the game.

Cinematics are good, but human gameplay animations suck. When a boss’s face gets bloody, and Clay is about to stab them with his big knife, the animation looks artistically messy, like a cartoon in the middle of a realistic game. In another example, Clay hides and whistles to get a thug to walk over, so he can then take the thug out with a knife. The thugs have a funny, unrealistic walk. Again, it felt like that was a piece of the game the studio could have redone, as it comes up over and over in the hundreds of battles you fight.

The character animations in the cutscenes are polished. But out on the street, when you run into A.I. characters, the quality of the realism suffers a big downgrade. A character might walk with a limp when he’s supposed to be walking normally. It almost reminds me of Grand Theft Auto III. More than anything, this ruined the immersion of the realistic open world for me.

The open world is awesome but also repetitive

Above: A scene from Mafia III.

Image Credit: 2K Games

The vast territory of New Bordeaux is a great selling point, much like the open worlds of Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V. It has a wide range of architecture, including Mardi Gras imagery in the French Ward and alligator swamps in the Bayou.

The reimagining of New Orleans as New Bordeaux in 1968 looks amazing from a distance, and every now and then, you feel like you are back in another era. But on closer look, a lot of it looks fake. If you focus on the people, they’re pretty disappointing in terms of graphical quality and behavior. All you have to do is linger with them to find out how shallow the non-player characters are.

The vastness can also be a liability. You wind up driving your car for five minutes at a time to get from one place to another. No easy way or shortcut exists to replace that. Open worlds have fascinating environments that take you to a place and time, and Mafia III has plenty of ambient events — like passersby who say hello and overheard conversations that mention something that just happened in the game.

But when you see the same things or the same behavior over and over, the repetition gets old. The game features some great scenes for combat, such as one where a boss is hidden in the middle of a bayou with dangerous alligators. But these are few and far between, as most of the battles are pretty routine. In the 30-hour-long campaign, I felt like I fought hundreds of times. And with that much content, it can’t help but feel repetitive.

Conclusion

Above: Clay’s car in Mafia III

Image Credit: 2K

The story of Lincoln Clay is a memorable epic tale of revenge. But Mafia III is flawed because of its failure to deliver the basic fun gameplay of an open world, based on the quality bar set by titles like Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V from sister company Rockstar Games at Take-Two Interactive. You have to forgive a lot in order to appreciate the movie-quality story.

As noted, I felt like I was playing Grand Theft Auto III. If I were rating the story and acting, I would put it at a 95 out of 100. But with all of the bugs and flaws in the gameplay, I am rating the entire package at 75 out of 100. I hope my feedback will be useful as a reminder to developers that six months more work on a game can pay off with huge dividends in quality. But I also believe some of the problems here would be very hard to fix with simple updates.

Score: 75/100

Mafia III debuted October 7 on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS. The publisher supplied GamesBeat with a copy of the game on the Xbox One for the purpose of this review.