Mafia as in Mafia
the pc game?? That was a fantastic game, one of the best I've played in years!
What's wrong with it?
It looked and sounded great, and the story was interesting. Some of the action sequence levels WOULD have been thrilling if not for the unforgivably buggy engine and control scheme -- this made the gameplay absolute sh!t IMHO.
The character controls were clumsy and awkward. Unresponsive and buggy as hell. The game relies on hand-to-hand combat in quite a few parts but the hand-to-hand system is garbage. It's worse when you have allies with you since they just run around like idiots doing just about nothing. Like on the level where you have to help Paulie beat-up a rival gang. Paulie runs up to the closest guy and half the time just sits there getting his ass kicked (and if he dies you lose). You can go help him, but only if you don't mind hurting him since anytime you throw a punch or swing a bat it hits EVERYONE in your vicinity so you can't hurt the bad guy without hurting Paulie.
The freindly AI is pretty much useless in the entire game. They follow you until they see an enemy and then they just run straight for the enemy firing. It doesn't matter if there is one enemy or 10 - they just blindly run and fire. At least the enemy AI uses cover. And since you HAVE to keep your team alive you really can't approach any of the levels with any kind of strategy other than rushing in front of your team and acting like a human shield (because, unlike your team, you CAN be healed). Your teammates also love running in front of you while you're firing a weapon. It's like they love getting caught in the crossfire. And they certainly have no problem putting you in the crossfire. They'll shoot at the enemies even if you are between them and the enemies.
The AI is also really good at getting hung up on the level geometry, making it impossible to trigger the next section of the level without restarting and doing everything over.
The excessive use of triggers is annoying too. Like on the airport stage with Frank. I blast my way through the airport and get to Frank, who just stands there like an idiot. He won't talk, won't move, won't do anything. So I beat him up thinking this will trigger his "talking" cutscene. No, he just dies and I fail the mission. I replay and again I get to him and he's just sitting there. Eventually I figure out that, because I didn't find a bad-guy hiding all the way on the other side of the airport, I can't "trip" this trigger. So I have to run all the way back, shoot the guy, and then return to get the level to continue. Dumb.
I also don't like that enemies spawn out of thin air at set trigger points. It's really bad on the airport level where, as you chase Frank, you can SEE that the hanger he runs through is empty. Of course as soon as you enter the hanger you can again SEE the enemies magically appear in the hanger.
The fixed save points are also extremely frustrating, especially when they are spaced way too far apart. Sometimes you get a save point after killing 2 or three guys, other times you have to drive across town, and massacre half an army before getting a save point. The "Hitman" save system would have been MUCH better -- you get a fixed number of saves, where you use them is your choice (and requires some careful thought).
And most of the cars in this game might as well be bicycles. I understand it's the 30's, but come on... Slowing to a 5 mph crawl while trying to get up a small hill isn't fun. Neither is taking 3 minutes to accelerate to 30 mph :p. There are some cars that can manage slightly above turtle speed, but the 40 mph speed limit and omnipresent police force makes that extra speed pretty pointless.
The car speeds and annoying police presence wouldn't be such an issue if it wasn't necessary to drive completely across town on EVERY SINGLE MISSION. And you usually have to drive back after the mission too.
So the gameplay basically amounts to 10 minutes of ho-hum driving for every minute of exciting gameplay. It's a cheap and lazy (and boring) way to extend the gameplay time.
Running from the cops isn't even that much fun because it isn't until about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through the game that you actually have a car capable of out-running the cops.
Stopping for a shoot-out with the cops is less fun than it should be also since the bounding/collision box models for the cars are awful. You can't really shoot from behind the cars since the guns won't fire if you are too close to the car (even if there is a clear line of sight from you to the enemy), and even if you can fire the bullets usually strike some "invisible" part of the car leaving a bullet hole hanging in empty air. This is great when you're trying to fire the Thompson from behind a car. You
think you're shooting OVER the car hood but you're actually just shooting the "invisible" part of the car. This becomes evident when the car you just shot to hell explodes in your face killing you.
The game is also insanely linear for being set in such an expansive, wide-open city.
There is no down-time between any of the missions. If you're in the main game you're on a mission. Most of the missions have set conditions and deadlines that make free-exploration impossible.
There is of course the "Free-Ride" mode which is an entirely seperate menu option. you get dumped in the city with a generic load out. The gun shop is on one side of town, the hospital on the other, and the bar (save point) at a completely different location. Saving costs money (a lot), but that's ok because there really isn't anything worth saving in free-ride mode. No secondary objectives, no mini-games, nothing. You get a generous selection of weapons to start. So really it's just a city with some cops and generic gangsters thrown in. It gets boring after about 5 minutes. There isn't enough to DO. And there aren't any parts of the city worth visitng since there is almost nothing in the city itself to interact with in a meaningful way (you can kill civilians/cops/gangsters ANYWHERE).
This game has great visuals, great sound, an good story, but an absolutely worthless gameplay experience (due in part to the horrible engine and extremely poor design choices). The GTA open-play formula is pretty simplistic and straight forward. How they managed to screw it up is beyond me.
But that's just my opinion. I'm obviously in the minority since the game got such high review marks (part of what drew me to the game even though it was older). I just don't see how so many issues can be overlooked simply because the game "looked" great. It certainly doesn't play great (for me anyway).
~Mike
