Mafia Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)My sister's boyfriend recommended me to buy this game, and as soon as I launched the Czech PC version of the game - which is the version that I started with - I found it totally amazing. I am proud of my fellow Czechs who were able to construct this game - a game chosen as the best game of the year 2002 (at least in many European countries). The amount of data (contained on 3 CD's) that the creators had to put together is shocking, and initially it seemed to me that a team of 20 people would need several centuries to finish this task. Well, fortunately they have used a lot of modern technology, for example a system to scan the motion of the real actors which is subsequently translated to the motion of the artificial humans, and therefore the task was doable. There are many hours of "movies" in between the different scenes, and there is a lot of audiovisual effects everywhere. The individuals in the game have pretty good artificial intelligence, and you will be impressed how realistic all these objects and their motion are (unlike the cartoonish style of GTA, for example).
The Lost Heaven City is a completely realistic city, designed according to the actual buildings in the New York City and Chicago of the 1930s. Everything seems to work perfectly in this city - including the gas stations, public transportation, banks, car races, ships, small airport, and so on. Imagine more than twenty squared miles of the urban architecture where everything responds in a realistic fashion, including many things that are unnecessary to fulfil the game's twenty main missions (e.g. you decide jump from the bridge in order to see the ship from another side). There are 60 different models of the cars - that you can steal on the street if you learned how - that were carefully copied from the real cars in the 1930s (but they were renamed). All these cars respect all the laws of physics and they are described by 100 physical parameters each. If you shoot at the car (or use some explosives), it's getting destroyed in a very realistic way.
Moreover, there are about 30 fan web sites dedicated to the game, and the people who understand computers well enough can have a lot of additional fun with modding the PC version of the game - changing the cars, textures on the buildings, music, sounds, and so on. The Xbox version does not allow you to do it, I guess, but it has other advantages over the PC version - it seems that the graphics is even smoother.
The game has a tutorial where you learn how to control Tommy (which is you). On the PC version, the arrow keys and other keys on the keyboard are used for motion (and changing the weapons, jumping, and so on) while the mouse allows you to change the direction where you look (or shoot), and this combination is very natural. You can practice as the taxi driver - you will learn geography of the Lost Heaven City after some time (the map is recommended). The main game has 20 main missions with 106 checkpoints or so where the game is saved, and afterwards you may continue with the "free ride extreme". Nevertheless, I needed about 50 hours to complete the main missions.
The story seems as a good piece of literature - you are a taxi driver who accidentally becomes a member of Mafia, and you are getting increasingly difficult tasks. Well, you will have to shoot a lot of people, but from a moral perspective, I am sure that at the end you will agree that being a mafioso is not the best (and easiest) option for your life - especially because your friend will betray you, and you will have to kill him. After the war, they will kill you anyway.
The game was banned in Italy for some time in 2002 because the authorities viewed it as a perfect textbook to become a criminal. The most natural audience for this game are almost definitely Americans like you, but the publisher company of the PC version did a bad job when they promoted this game in the U.S. and the success in the U.S. was much weaker than the game's achievements in Europe. Therefore you are sort of lucky to read this review. Mafia might be the best game ever (so far, as of January 2004), and it is much less known in the U.S. than it should be (so far). Don't get manipulated by the advertisements of less perfect games. Buy Mafia, and you will be impressed.

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Product Description:
In Mafia, you've been accepted into the ruthless Salieri crime family, and your goal is to rise to the top!

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