Shooting is serviceable, but it isn’t anything to write home about. You aim (with some assist, depending on the difficulty you chose) and you pull the trigger until the bad guys drop. You have other options such as explosives, vehicular combat, and even intimidation, but none of them feel particularly fresh in the grand scheme of things. While it all works well, it just feels like filler to lead you from major plot point to major plot point, something that struck me as odd for an action game.

Even the mission structure comes across as uninspired. You go to locations and wreck them until you’ve done enough damage to bring out the “boss.” After that, you kill or recruit them then give the area to one of your underbosses. The underbosses do add a bit of strategy to the whole affair, since you must keep them happy lest you find yourself standing at the business end of one of their guns. It’s a mechanic that sounds amazing on paper, but in practice it feels just okay. Not bad, but certainly not why you will remember Mafia III years down the line.

The power to leave Mafia III’s world burned into your mind belongs to New Bordeaux and its atmosphere alone. Even with the seemingly tacked-on gameplay, I couldn’t help but be pulled back into this troubling cycle of hatred and tough choices. I had wanted to use stealth as much as possible, a ridiculously easy route in most combat scenarios, but witnessing women being kidnapped and drugs being peddled to the poor often pushed me to fire a lot of bullets and cause a ruckus. At times, I think stealth’s ease was meant to show just how irrational hatred and revenge could make me. Whenever I came across a group of gangsters or some backwater drug dealers, I had the option of sticking to the shadows or showing them exactly who came to reap them from their mortal coil. The shadows works pretty much all of the time, and carries none of the threat of death that the guns-blazing alternative. All neon signs point at the nonlethal, but in the end I chose pools of blood and the scent of gunpowder lingering in the air.

That’s what Mafia III left with me, a bunch of dark decisions in a dark world that wants me dead in a way no other game does. It’s easy to be the bane of your enemy’s existence when you’re some hero coming to save the world from annihilation, but if the unforgettable target on your back is painted only by who you happened to be born as, it’s an altogether different experience. I was angry through a lot of my time with this game, and that’s a good thing. For the first time in a long time I was going after virtual enemies for my own personal reasons, not because the game told me I should. I wanted to see them dead, I wanted to watch their blood pool around them, and it was a frightening thing.

In the end, my vengeance did little more than beget more pain in the city I made mine. Mafia III took me through a grand tale of loss and, in the end, after all of my macho escapades, I was left more empty, realizing no amount of killing could change what was done. For that reason, Mafia III is not a game to be missed by anyone.

Score: 4/5 – Great