This one has been a tricky one to write. Even as I sit here typing these first few sentences, I’ve already deleted a few paragraphs, more than once. In all, this is probably my third or fourth attempt. I don’t even know if you’ll read these words even, or if they’ll get scrubbed as I start all over again.

I’ve always felt that the games that are the hardest to write for are the good games that work fine, and are just… fine. Amazing games leave a strong impression. Horrible games leave a strong impression. Games are like food. The amazing stuff leaves an impression, and so do the horrible ones. Average meals, the ones you eat just to sustain yourself, are forgotten almost immediately. Yesterday I had a burger that was downright awful, and I’m still thinking about it, but I can’t tell you what I had for dinner the night before that. As such, I’ve experienced great games that I still think about, and terrible games that leave the same impression. But my life is filled with over thirty years of good games that I played and forgot. I have a feeling that Mafia Definitive Edition will join that pantheon of average games that I might look at again years down the road and say, “Oh yeah.”

Mafia DE is a perfectly “ok” game. It’s not bad by any means. It’s not great by any means either. It’s kind of a baffling decision to remake it, honestly. Never once during my playthrough did I understand why it was done. I get it, it’s a good, narrative-driven, (not really) open-world game, and it looks damn nice, but it just didn’t hit the heights I expected it to. Granted, it’s a mafia story taking place in the 20’s and 30’s, so of course it’s not going to have huge, God of War-style set pieces, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some tense moments. The game does attempt these, but I think the design of the game was limited by the technology at the time, and again limited by the need to stick to the original, where it just never really hits the tension or even the gritty realism that some of the scenes portray.

That’s not to say the story wasn’t interesting. It definitely had its moments, but I felt myself playing it in short sessions, one or two chapters at a time, due to its linear story-telling and chapter-based setup. While it’s great that it wasn’t an open world game, the downside is that I couldn’t just hop in and play for a few minutes and do a side quest or two and call it a day. When I would sit to play, I had to do so with the mindset that I was going to be playing for an hour or so, as I didn’t really like stopping in the middle of a chapter. I also had to go in resigned to the fact that I was going to be sitting through cutscenes that are who knows how long. It’s the same reason it’s hard for me to get into JRPG’s nowadays, but I digress…

You might have noticed, that for all the things I’ve said, I haven’t really gone into specifics on the game. That’s because, well, there really isn’t much to say. The graphics are great, the sound and voice acting is great, the story is decent (if a bit “Goodfellas”) and the controls… work. They can be a bit stiff, but at no point did I feel like they were holding me back. It’s a good package that, if you’re into these kinds of games, would be worth a few bucks. I bought the trilogy for less than twenty bucks on sale, so if you want to take that into consideration, so be it. Maybe I might have been a bit more critical.

As I said, I have the trilogy, so I still need to get through the other two Mafia games. I’ve played about thirty seconds of Mafia II so maybe I’ll dig into that one here in the near future.