Dons at war. Heists, prison breakouts, and shootouts. Horse and car races. An impossible love story. Opera assassinations and chases through Italian catacombs — Mafia: The Old Country has it all. It'll have you smiling from ear-to-ear sometimes, and rolling your eyes just as much, because as exciting as these elements sound, they're absolutely nothing new.

I'd been waiting a long time for this one. The first Mafia game remains an unforgettable title, especially if you'd been a '90s gamer who just began seeing the magic of huge sandboxes. Then came Mafia 2 and 3, and while I am part of the minority who loved the third part of this remarkable trilogy, there's no denying that the series had lost a bit of the spark that made it special.

With Mafia: The Old Country, Hangar 13 veers away from the urban open-world format — an impressive gamble that has certainly paid off where it needed to. Having freshly finished it over the weekend, my mind is still stuck in the early 1900s Sicilian playground I was in, and I wish I could've stayed longer, or found something exciting to do once the credits rolled.

Mafia: The Old Country price and availability

Mafia: The Old Country is available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro. The game is also enhanced for PS5 Pro. The game comes in two editions:

• Standard Edition ($50): The base game. Only the standard edition is available for physical purchase.
• Deluxe Edition ($60): This includes the full base game, the Padrino Pack and Gatto Nero Pack with special skins for weapons, vehicles, and horses. It also comes with a digital artbook and the original score for the game.

The game's story is engaging, but extremely clichéd

The narrative is absolutely by-the-numbers

Full disclosure — I found myself invested in the story of Mafia: The Old Country from start to finish. In keeping the player engaged, the story does a wonderful job, in tandem with the game's pacing, which doesn't let its foot off the gas for a second. After the hour-long prologue, it's get-set-go for Enzo, the protagonist, as he escapes a life of servitude to serve with Don Torrisi's famiglia, finding food, respect, and a bed to sleep. The problem, however, is pretty much the rest of it.

This is such a by-the-numbers story that I couldn't help but roll my eyes all the way up into my head every ten minutes. There's the reserved Don Torrisi, head of the Torrisi family. His right-hand man, composed and mature, takes our protagonist in and acts as a mentor. Then there is the Don's nephew, who'd rather waste away in wine and women rather than pay attention to the 'family business', and a couple of family members who don't take too kindly to us, an 'outsider'. Sound familiar? That's because it completely is — Mafia: The Old Country throws every single trope at the wall unabashedly, down to the love interest who forces the protagonist to rethink his loyalties.

You can smell every single story beat, ambush, and betrayal a mile away. It's an impressive feat, then, for the game to keep players invested regardless, and that is only thanks to the charming cast of characters and their writing — you just want to keep seeing them on the screen and hearing them talk.

Stellar acting performances are the story's saving grace

The story's terribly boring, but the characters are not

It's the acting performances in Mafia: The Old Country that really take the cake here. Every single character in the game has weight to their lines and personality, and they all feel like truly believable characters you root for, throughout. Paired with the fantastic screenplay, my time with the game did have me invested because of how much the game felt like a fantastic, classic mafia movie unfolding chapter by chapter.

I sure have my complaints about the content of the plot, but the pacing? Top-notch, along with the direction. A narrative-focused linear experience is the best way to get some great performances from your actors and characters on the screen, and the game manages to achieve exactly that.

Sadly, the central character, Enzo Favara, voiced by Riccardo Frascari, is the least impressive among the entire cast. With zero personality, Enzo can either grimace or look sheepishly around, asking the questions the script wants him to ask for us, the players. Frascari may have done a great job, but the script itself makes Enzo devoid of any real personality, giving him fickle and conflicting motivations. This is a protagonist who merely waits for the plot to happen to him rather than acting and moving things forward. And yet, the rest of the cast, from Enzo's new friends, to even the house help in the family, have acted so well that every scene stands out.

Gameplay is the biggest let-down in Mafia: The Old Country

Seventeen hours of gameplay, and nothing new to do

For all the things Mafia: The Old Country does well (and there aren't a lot), gameplay simply isn't one of them. The game takes the road most traveled when it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay, the combat, the stealth, and progression. Throughout your 16 to 17 hours playing this game, you will either be sneaking around while crouched, shooting from cover, driving, or walking. There is nothing else, and whatever there is, is just pressing buttons to see animations or mechanics you've seen a thousand times for over a decade now. There simply isn't a single gameplay mechanic or system that Mafia: The Old Country can call its own.

The worst offenders were moments when you had to 'crack a safe' — blatant excuses to pad a mission's runtime or give you something 'new' to do. What's the point of giving me a safe to 'crack' when the code is always written on a slip in the very room, every single time?

When you're sneaking, you take down enemies and stash them in the most conveniently-placed boxes to hide the bodies. When you're shooting, you're just peeking out of cover to land a couple of shots. When you're driving, you're always going to be winning every race magically if you drive even half-decently, since that's what the script demands. There is absolutely zero new ground broken in the gameplay.

There is zero innovation in either gameplay or story

Come for the visuals, stay for the visuals alone

The game even pretends to give you something to do with inconsequential collectibles across the semi-open-world, but they have no bearing or gameplay advantage until the credits roll. There's a separate free-roam mode where you can traverse the map, treating it like an open-world to pick up all the collectibles, but I just stared at that option for five minutes, trying to decide if that was worth it. It really wasn't, so I just quit to desktop after the credits rolled and that was it. Fifty dollars, used up.

The worst part? All of this would've been okay, had the story itself presented something new, but with both the narrative and the gameplay 'playing the hits', showing you things you've seen a million times over across all forms of media, the result is definitely stale when you're holding the controller.

The only engaging parts are the knife fights, where you dodge, parry, and slash to whittle down the mini-boss's health bar. Even those overstayed their welcome once the second half started, and I once again started rolling my eyes at how every single boss fight ended up being a knife fight — guns were either dropped away out of 'pride and honor', or they simply vanished out of frame, so you can have an up-close-and-personal duel with a boss, all of which have second stages.

Knives in the game have different 'abilities' — some are less durable, some you can throw at enemies, and some hit harder during the aforementioned duels. Do any of them matter? Short answer — no. Long answer — no, they don't matter.

The Old Country is breathtaking to look at

This is true next-gen presentation

When Mafia: The Old Country was revealed, I'd started counting the days to its release. The early 1900s Sicilian map they chose is a rare choice, and I'm glad it wasn't another urban city with busy lanes and streets. I can't say this with enough emphasis — 1903 Sicily in the game is drop-dead gorgeous. The mountains in the distance outlining Valle Dorata, the game map, are lined with lush trees till the eye can see, all rendered in fantastic detail.

Vineyards, lawns, churches, and forest trails all called out to me constantly to stop what I was doing and take the landscape in, which I did multiple times. It is absolutely clear that the game world is a labor of love, painstakingly built with a passion for Sicilian architecture and beauty. The global illumination only makes things better, with sunlight being the hero of the show here as it hits you strongly, but never harshly. Even the food, from oranges and lemons, to chicken soup and bread rolls and pastries in marketplaces, looks downright phenomenal. Taking screenshots of the food was easy. Looking away, however, was not.

The attention to textural detail across the board is nothing short of obsessive, be it the weathered stucco on a church wall, or the warm glow of the city center fountain at dusk. Every frame looks like it belongs in an art book, and for that, the game deserves its flowers. No, the dirt doesn't always develop horse tracks or imprints of your footsteps, and I didn't even try to take a closer look at the horse balls, but not every game needs to have the sort of detail a thousand devs can give to something like GTA V or RDR2 — and that's okay. What always matters is the final product you get, and on the visual front, Mafia: The Old Country delivers abundantly.

Sadly, the game's performance and optimization is terrible

The usual Unreal Engine 5 pitfalls

As beautiful as the game is, I'm simply not onboard with how much of a toll it takes on the PC. First, the game comes with the usual host of Unreal Engine 5-based games, down to the shimmery hair and ghosted hairs. While playing on maxed out settings on a native 1440p resolution, I couldn't get anything north of 40fps. With DLSS Quality turned on, it reached the high 50s, occasionally touching 60.

It was only with DLSS Quality and Frame Generation 2x turned on that I finally got a stable 75-90 fps experience, but the game's application of frame gen definitely needs more work — the ghosting here reminded me of how Spider-Man Remastered looked like on PC when it first came out with Nvidia's frame-gen tech. The sweet spot then would be somewhere between high and maximum settings, with DLSS Quality to reach 60+ without having to touch frame generation. Since the credits have rolled for me, I'm just going to wait for some good optimization guides to watch over a meal, instead.

Does Mafia: The Old Country justify its $50 price tag?

The million-dollar question

Let's address the elephant in the room first — the $50 price tag for the base game. Video game prices are all up in the air right now, it seems, and everybody seems to be settling at their pick of the nearest ten. Where Mafia 3, nine years ago, was a $60 game, The Old Country costs $10 less, and delivers a far smaller, intimate level-based experience. Does it succeed in justifying its price, then? Not really, no. The game will dazzle your eyes, charm you with its cast, and briefly make you believe that you've stepped into a timeless mafia epic.

But once the new-game smell fades, you'll realize it's running entirely on borrowed ideas. The gameplay is painfully by-the-book, story beats are as predictable as sunrise, and there's just no innovation going on here. I can absolutely see this as a $20 weekend pick-up a few months from now, but fifty bucks is still a steep price to ask for a 16-hour trip where the biggest surprises came from how good the oranges looked. Plus, you'd be wasting your time with mid-range PCs on this one, especially if you get it for full price.

There's a ton of wasted potential here

I wish I wasn't so torn about how I feel regarding Mafia: The Old Country. The game could've been phenomenal — a breathtaking postcard from early 1900s Sicily. But flip it over, and you get a story you've already seen and gameplay you've already experienced a thousand times over.

Beauty alone can't carry a game, and here, it's doing the heaviest lifting. At this time, you could very well just watch a no-commentary playthrough over the weekend, saving yourself fifty bucks in the process. Like a perfect glass of wine served with stale bread, Mafia: The Old Country leaves you wondering how something so lovely can taste so forgettable.