This week, we received nine new minutes of gameplay fromMafia: The Old Country, and Hangar 13’s prequel is already living up to its name ahead of its August launch. This looks likeoldcountry, indeed; familiar territory that anyone who has played an action-adventure game in the past decade has already thoroughly explored.
The problem is less that the gameplay looks straight-up bad and more thatit looks unremarkable, with nine minutes that contain nothing worth thinking about after the video ends. So, where does it all go wrong?
Old Country For Made Men
When the video begins, we see Hangar 13 revisiting extremely well-worn mafia tropes. The lead character, Enzo Favara, is invited into a meeting with the leader of the Torrisi crime family. This interaction is so close to The Godfather that Francis Ford Coppola could sue for plagiarism, with Torrisi bathed in shadows that are broken up by sunlight through Venetian blinds. As in The Godfather, this leader is positioned behind a desk when we first meet him, and speaks with a Brando-esque quiet power.
Once the cinematic cliches end, the interactive ones begin, as Enzo and a family handler walk out of the office. The handler speaks exclusively in expository dialogue, setting up the story behind the farm Enzo will assault later in the video, and saying, “But first, let’s get you what you need to get the job done.” It’s the kind of pre-mission patter you’ve heard a million times, and it doesn’t improve once you get to the weapons storehouse, and the family armorer offers comments like, “Ah, a large-bore pistol. That thing will tear through just about anything,” as you inspect the weapons.
Again, it’s not that this isbad, necessarily. Games need to tell you how to play them, and having an in-world character do it via dialogue is less disruptive than popping a tutorial on the screen. The problem is mostly that this is exactly that: a voice-acted tutorial screen. It would be fine if the preview went somewhere more interesting, but it doesn’t.
It’s hard to know if some of this isIGNchoosing to highlight a boring stretch of the game, and how much is the game being boring. Maybe IGN highlighted it because it was the most interesting section it had. We don’t know.
A Scenic Drive You Definitely Want To Skip, Right?
After that, the player drives out to the villa they need to assault. The scenery looks good — it would be hard to make the Italian countryside looktoobad — but nothing happens along the way. The game seems to know that you might get bored without anything to do, and a “Skip Drive” prompt hovers over the speedometer for the entire trip.
Once you get to the villa, the video skips forward a few hours, and Enzo consults with three guys before beginning his assault. It is unclear who these three guys are, but the most important of them speaks to you with a sonorous voice that is somewhat undercut by his character model looping through the same idle animations multiple times in about 30 seconds.
Now, Enzo infiltrates the villa, taking out enemies as he goes, then returning to cover. I’m a sucker for stealth-action gameplay, but nothing here looks the least bit novel. Enzo sneaks up behind a guard and knifes him. He throws a coin to distract another before knifing him, too. He throws a grenade at the feet of two others, which dispatches them as they scramble. Then he breaks cover to trade gunfire with the remaining survivors before confronting and killing the family leader.
It’s all so rote. The gameplay taking place in Italy during the early 20th century makes it a little-seen setting, but that’s the only thing that seems remotely unique. The game might be interesting in action. But nothing in this preview suggests that it will be anything more than the bog-standard action-adventure game with stealth elements we’ve played a hundred times now.
