Mafia III - Xbox One Gaming Review
Posted on: 2016-10-24
Our rating:
During cinematic scenes the game shows that it can look great with impressive animations and voice acting with perfect lip syncing, you can even see the characters tongues as they speak and it matches the words they’re saying.
Mafia III was a title I was looking forward to since its announcement last year; however this is the most disappointing game I’ve played this year and it pains me to say this as I love the first two Mafia games. The game is boring and repetitive with no variation from main activities and side activities as you do the same thing over and over again, coupled with graphical glitches and inconsistent visuals.
Mafia III takes place in a recreation of New Orleans which it is known as New Bordeaux in 1968, you play as Lincoln Clay a Vietnam war veteran who has come back to see he his family. However his family are in trouble with the local mob family that have control of most of the city and they have to pull off a daring heist, everything goes to plan but then they are double crossed by Sal Marcano the Don of the family and are gunned down in a brutal fashion. Lincoln manages to survive a bullet to the head and plots his revenge by taking over the city and killing anyone who gets in his way. This game does not pull any punches with the subject matter as it is set in the 60’s with the racial tensions of the time so they don’t shy away from using certain words so if you’re sensitive about aspects like this, don’t play the game.
The gameplay is a typical open world game which every game seems to strive for these days which is starting to test my patience, it’s not that I don’t like open world games it’s the fact it has become the default action game and they put little thought into them. The problem I have with this game is that you do the same thing within each district where you interrogate a member of the enemy gang they divulge information about the racket and you go and blow up, steal or kill someone who runs the racket and you do this over and over again and it never changes.
You can choose your approach where you can kick the door down and gun down anything that moves or you can go for a sneaky approach and dispatch enemies with your combat knife, but again you find an exploit and it feels like you’re going through a check list rather than playing a game. The gameplay is functional but it is uninspired with standard cover based shooting and stealth mechanics with laughable artificial intelligence with predictable paths, coupled with frustrating damage output as the machine gun and shotgun enemies do too much damage and you’ll be dead within two seconds.
The game doesn’t look bad but the visuals are inconsistent as it can look amazing sometimes but it can then look really drab and blurry, the game looks beautiful during the night when it’s raining as you see rain drops hit your car and the pavement. However when it’s sunny it can look really bad with too much lens flare and a terrible draw distance I don’t understand how Mafia II a game that came out six years ago on a previous generation console looks better than this game. During cinematic scenes the game shows that it can look great with impressive animations and voice acting with perfect lip syncing, you can even see the characters tongues as they speak and it matches the words they’re saying, it’s just a shame the rest of the game falls short in the graphics department.
The soundtrack is great they have nailed it from the original score with blues and country tones to the licensed tracks from artists such as The Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival. It’s easily the best part of the game.
There were a few glitches during my play time such as the dynamic weather messing up where it would suddenly switch from night to day which sucks the immersion out of the experience. Audio cut out on me during one scene where I could not hear any music or dialogue. The final issue I had is that the game crashed on me six times resulting me being booted back to the dashboard on my Xbox One.
Mafia III is a massive disappointment it has a great story with its controversial setting but the gameplay was too boring and repetitive for me to care about the story in the end coupled with the glitches and crashes, it’s a shame as it had a strong opening but after that it falls short.
2.5/5
Article by:
Sam has lived in Bristol all his life. A keen cyclist he speeds around the city but video games are his bread and butter. Whether the old Nes and Snes games or the XBox One and Playstation releases he loves them all. Sam runs his own gaming blog called Bristolian Gamer where he had been reviewing indie games, doing retro reviews and venting his anger at the industry when it does wrong since 2010. Sam joined the 365Bristol team in December 2014.
