Mafia: The Old Country

Written by Eric Hauter on 8/7/2025 for PC  

Sometimes, you’ve got to take a step back to go forward. In the case of the Mafia game franchise, the new title Mafia: The Old Country is taking a step back in more ways than one, and the result bursts forward as one of the best single-player narrative games I’ve played in years.

Rather than continue the series’ march through the Mafia’s history in the United States, The Old Country takes players back further into the Mafia’s history with a story set in the Sicily of the early 1900s. This is a time period that might be familiar to Red Dead fans; when the game starts, horses are just as ubiquitous as cars, and modern conveniences like electric lighting and indoor plumbing slowly creep into the game’s setting as the years march by. This isn't a Mafia origin story; the structure of the organization is already in place. Instead, we get a great look at how the Mafia operated in its original context, which gives a greater understanding of the operational traditions and procedures that were eventually carried to the United States.

Developer Hanger 13 also reels back the open world setting found in Mafia 3 and restores the franchise to its more curated roots. Yes, there is a large, beautiful world map here in which the story takes place, but the game very rarely takes the reins off the player to allow exploration; you can replay levels if you want to wander around. Instead, your first time through, it’s wise to just stick to the path the development team has laid out for you. This is a cinematic tale, and your desire to go wandering around will like likely be trumped by the intense need to see what happens next in the story.

The Old Country follows the exploits of Enzo, a young man who has been sold into indentured servitude by his father to pay off gambling debts. At the beginning of the game, Enzo is nearing the end of his required work period in the local sulfur mines when events go off the rails, putting him on the run from his bad-guy bosses. Enzo is soon taken under the protective wing of the local Torrisi crime family, where he does odd jobs in exchange for room and board (which is pretty much a bed in the pig barn).

Before long, Enzo is proving himself useful at activities more complex than slopping the barn and stacking crates, and he is slowly introduced to the family’s real business. This process is shown with great care, which allows players to see how someone from Enzo’s destitute background could easily reason that shaking down the locals and fixing races does less harm than living under the oppressive rule of local law. Doesn’t the Don actually protect the people in the valley? Doesn’t he actually provide a service when bandits strike and the locals need him? Aren’t the other guys in “this thing” Enzo’s friends, all of them loyal, brave, and true to the end? Did the law do anything to help Enzo when he was being beaten and forced to work without rest in the mine?

All of this is shown rather than told, allowing the player to come to their own conclusions about Enzo’s choices and rationales. PR released before the game likened The Old Country to a “Mafia movie you can play,” but I prefer to think of it as a Mafia novel. The characters are too developed and the story is too rich to be confined to the brief running time offered by a film.

I’m going to purposely avoid sharing any further story beats, other than to praise the performances of the actors portraying Enzo, his love interest, his best friend, and the Don himself. As the hours tick by, these characters start to feel real in a way that I’ve rarely encountered in video games. I reached the end of the game before I realized that I never even considered skipping a dialogue or cut scene. It would be an outright sin to skip past anything so finely crafted.

So yes, Mafia: The Old Country is absolutely worth playing through for the story and characters, and this is obviously what I cared most about. I also want to call attention to the insanely detailed world the game takes place in. Everything from the sprawling fields of grape vines to the chug of the old-timey race cars feels authentic, lived-in, and is gorgeous to behold. Forget engaging with the “Explore” mode to gather collectibles (which the game introduces and then promptly forgets to make time for). Instead, “Explore” just to look around at this lively world Hanger 13 has created. I’d kill for an Assassin’s Creed-style tour mode that explained what all this stuff is in its historic context.

The rest of the game is what I would call “serviceable” – it will feel immediately familiar to anyone that has played a video game over the last 20 years. Combat is a mix of basic coin-throwing stealth and cover-based shooting. It all works perfectly fine, and it plays out in some unique settings that I haven’t experienced before in gaming. The shootouts are rare enough to be exciting when they happen, and the music cranks up the player’s adrenaline quite nicely. I also enjoyed how, when I lost patience with stealth areas, I was able just to start plugging dudes and the game took it in stride, shifting from stealth to shooting without blinking.

Many (if not most) of the battles end in a knife fight with whatever big bad you are currently facing. If there’s one thing about The Old Country, the homies that live there love to knock guns out of each other’s hands so they can settle matters with a bit of stabby-stabby. These fights are fun, if a bit unresponsive. I found that the dodge button sometimes didn’t work when I wanted it to, which made some of these fights suspiciously more intense and closer than I thought they really should be. Whatever, it was fine. Stabbing baddies is still satisfying and fun.

Don’t get overly worried about or attached to your weapons here; The Old Country subscribes to the Nathan Drake method of “drop this one thing and pick up this other thing” in the heat of battle. Sure, you can spend money and unlock certain weapons, but I didn’t focus on it all that much. I also wouldn’t worry about looting every single corpse; there is a money system, but the game doesn’t give you many opportunities to spend your cash. Committed players will likely want to buy up all the various vehicles in their various colors, but most of us will be satisfied with one nice car, horse, knife, etc.

I did encounter some weird technical glitches in the game that broke immersion a bit. To be fair, I’m playing with a GTX 2080, so I’m not exactly rocking the “recommended” build here. But on my PC, the transitions between player-controlled areas and cut scenes are very rough, with the game chugging to load the next thing while the visual display sputters around. There also seemed to be some trouble loading facial textures, with the game instead showing a grid of lines on characters’ faces until the PC caught up and slapped their freckles and wrinkles into place. Neither of these were deal breakers, and they will likely be patched out, but they were a bit distracting.

For something made with such deliberate care and love, I’m more than willing to forgive a few technical bumps in the road. Mafia: The Old Country contains some top-of-the-line video game storytelling, with the narrative taking its place right up there with Naughty Dog’s best work.

I’ve seen some rumbling online about the game’s 10 - 12 hour length; I found it to be perfectly appropriate for the story being told. The pacing feels right, and the story delivers some great twists and big moments amidst a backdrop of plenty of quieter character beats, which allows the whole thing to jell into something you actually care about. The story zigs when I expect it to zag and subverted what I thought were my expectations. I wish more developers would take a look at their ongoing series and realize that bigger isn’t always better. In this case, taking a step backwards has resulted in a remarkable step forward for the Mafia Franchise, and narrative video games in general.