Ok... so Mafia 3 so after 52 hours i'm done with it. I won't lie, not all of that time felt wasted. Yet, would i recommend this game to people to play? if i'm being brutally honest, no.
Its a bit of shame really, there is a lot to like about Mafia 3. The whole things feels like like there was some effort/dedication. The devs have captured the 60s and the racial prejudice of that area very very well. The story, whilst nothing special, is well presented and brilliantly voiced. The Documentary style works very well and the facial expressions is brilliant. The game has some useful features bullet time and slowmo to make driving easier. That said, there is room for improvement, customizing cars etc can only be done if you drive a car you own. Speaking of Cars, if you find a steal a sports car that you like but isn't classified as "owned" don't expect to keep it for long. Switch cars (even in a mission) and its gone. deeply frustrating when you're doing a delivery mission and you lose your sports/racing car for slow truck....
But lets get to the crux of the problems with game. The repetitive grindy nature is pretty significant and its a killjoy. The busy work to take over and maintain an illegal business is just a chore. Hell, in some cases you would break into their homebase of these illegal businesses before going back to take it over proper! i would find myself cleaning the property out and when it came to time to take over the business i just repeated the same pathway getting in and moving through the heavily fortified areas!
But it doesn't stop there. Once you capture a base and depending on how messy you did it you can boost/maximise its money return doing side jobs for the faction you installed. All the missions involve driving out into the swamp, stealing a slow lorry, truck or boat and driving it back to the place. Apart from vito's favour missions, the other ones are just bloody fetch quests. Steal trucks full of guns and return to HQ or Steal x number of vehicles. Boring as hell and busy work.
To its credit, the main story missions are some of the most exciting and entertaining of the lot. How about infiltrating a hotel and shooting your way out of the lobby? battling through a slowly sinking steamboat are real highlights.
but on the flip side, you have to collect stuff. The good news is that you don't have to collect all the fuses (theres nearly 300 of them scattered around). Feel free to collect enough to bug/hack the city and collect the rare playboy/car mags, commie posters, sexy art and song album covers. Hell cut out the repetitive missions and save me 20+ hours of tedium.
Its not the repetitive nature of missions, its also the gameplay. Granted the guns are varied and isn't terrible. The problem is the rinse and repeat combat where i resorted to sneaking in, stealth take down an objective and the same faceless mobster goons or dixie mafia. My go to weapon was a silencer pistol and a decent AR and even on hard it was surprisingly easy thanks to some lax AI at times. Stop shooting and hiding behind cover and they forget that you're there and start searching.
Granted they have different architypes (burley men armed with shotguns, those wearing full suits having ARs etc) but its not strong enough to add any variation especially in tactics. The solution is always the same and adds little variety to combat. Compared to Assassins creed, different architypes looked to show rank and attack type meant different take down methods. The lack of variety hurts, but the subject matter based in the 1960s doesn't really offer much design room. You can't have heavily armored mobsters with bullet proof shields, etc or russian spetzsnatz style kill teams coming after you. No, you have to contend with greasers or guns in suits.
Finally bugs, the smattering of other issues just ruins it. The more amusing ones was the ragdoll physics. Won't lie, they are pretty good, but other times its just hilariously awful and funny. namely when they fall over a chair/low object and they scream as if they were falling over a gantry. Less amusing was when I had to reinstall a MS redistribution file otherwise the game wouldn't load. Some missions refuse to start after talking to people, NPCS not opening doors and all leading to checkpoint restarts. Throw in the irritating problem of unable to get out of the water even if its a gradual incline. I have no idea what the reason is for that, its just terrible when you see it. EDIT: forgot to mention: Achievements are bugged. It doesn't record the number of times you do something after quiting. So something simple as performing 100 stealth takedowns means you have to do it in one sit through. More obnoxious is either sparing/killing 16 racket bosses. You practically have to play the entire game in a sitting...
But what about the DLC? The good news is that the DLC is one of Mafia 3's strong points, adding much needed variety and excitement especially when the levels are scripted narratively means that they're exciting and really entertaining. hell, leaving new bordeaux meant that i could see and experience some refreshing gameplay. Chasing a rogue cia agent through a nuclear missile facility battling mercs and using all the big guns is a real treat. Go faster baby! whilst story mission isn't long is jolly good fun as you tear through Sinclair parish wrecking the town and causing general mayhem. Or perhaps dealing with a murderous, racist hippie cult with a show down in an abandoned converted asylum? To top it off, you get some pretty tasty rewards playing them. That's not to say that there aren't any missteps, setting up your weed business is tedious and boring. takes a long time to grow the stuff and if you want to get more exotic plants to mix new exciting strains? guess what? fetch quests. This time going back to Sinclair every so often...
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