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The Review Geek
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Review Geek
Mafia: The Old Country Guide: 'Chapter 5 – Vendetta D'Onore' Walkthrough & Collectibles
Mafia: The Old Country Guide: Chapter 5 – Vendetta D'Onore Speak to Don Torrisi Back to top ↑ After speaking to Isabella at the church, head back to the estate and into the house. Take a right in the main lobby (away from the kitchen) and grab Note: Cleanup Initiative from the table. Head up the stairs and round the corner, where you'll find Newspaper: Wave of Anarchy on the side just opposite the marked room (pictured below). Next, head inside the marked room to speak to the Don. After the cutscene, follow Luca outside. From here, go and speak to Valerio. There will be a brief little sequence where you can choose a weapon to take into the battlefield with you, so choose whatever you feel most comfortable with. When you're ready hold Square (X) to interact with Valeria. Get a car Back to top ↑ When you leave the room, Isabella will encourage you to move a crate with her. Pick it up and place it on the adjacent table. Afterwards, head over to the garage and choose a vehicle. You can buy one of the unlockables with Dinari if you wish but otherwise choose your car and drive over to meet Tino. Meet Tino at the lookout Back to top ↑ Drive your car over to Tino's and after parking up, be sure to grab Newspaper: Races in Palermo from the table in front of you. Afterwards, head for the marked spot with Tino and you'll find Note: Torrisi Logbook just next to the marked spot you need to wait at. Infiltrate Ludovici's Villa Back to top ↑ This next section will require you to sneak into the Villa but to do so without being spotted. Now, there are two routes to go here and both can be done quietly to nab the Achievement: Fantasma. If you choose to go right, be prepared for a lot more guards and a bit of distracting. This section is split into two parts, with the second involving a large courtyard that you'll need to use thrown bottles to distract guards to get past. It's doable but tricky. Alternatively, if you take the left path, you'll find a locked gate you can open and some collectibles on the way so it's recommended to take this path. Once you're through the gate, look out for a sloped path leading up and by a stack of wood, a ladder leading up. Afterwards, look for a garage with a Trinacria inside on the worktop. Exiting the garage toward the marker, you'll find a large courtyard with a set of stairs leading up. Inside the garden to the left of these stairs, you'll find a bench with Newspaper: Sicilian Parades on. Head up the stairs and enter the villa. Reach Ludovici's Study Back to top ↑ Inside the villa, head through the double doors directly in front of you to the next room (with the wooden floor and the red rug) and you'll find Note: Ludovici's Collection, another Trinacria and Charm: Caricato. Just next to the study, you'll find Note: Protection Agreement. There's also some ammo and a bandage out on the balcony if you push open the double-doors too leading outside (opposite the study door). When you're ready though, push open the doors and if you did all of this in stealth, you'll also nab the Achievement: Fantasma! Kill Ludovici's Guards/Chase After Ludovici Back to top ↑ From your starting position, kill the two guards outside in the courtyard and work your way through the house back whence you came. You'll wind up heading all the way to the start point (if you entered the villa area via the right path). However, don't do this just yet. Instead, right after wrestling with the goon outside the study, head back into the study and check in the corner by the plants, where you'll find a Mystery Fox in the corner. Head outside and on the way, try to get some headshots in toward your weapon-based trophies! Eventually you'll catch up with Ludovici after defeating all the guards. Knock him out and take him to the car. Bring Ludovici to the old castellio Back to top ↑ With Ludovici in the car, drive over to the designated slot. Carry Ludovici up the path to Tino and you'll be told to execute him. However, if you holster your gun and let the timer run out, Tino will get annoyed and kill Enzo. When he does, this will net you the Achievement: Man of Honor for refusing Tino's orders. You'll have to restart the checkpoint to get to this spot again, but if you're after 100%, it's a necessary step! The second time around, execute Ludovici and after the cutscene, you'll be back at the villa. Follow Cesare/ Drive to San Celeste Back to top ↑ Follow Cesare all the way into the cellar, where another story cutscene will play out. Afterwards, you'll need to drive with the boys while drunk. You'll have several stops along the way as you drive to San Celeste. This section does go on for a while but eventually you'll arrive at a villa. Follow the boys inside to the apartment, and be sure to grab the Trinacria from the kitchen side. Next, inspect the various items dotted around, including the Note: Threatening Letter on the side and the wardrobe. Inside the bedroom, head over to the side of the bed and interact with the book to end the chapter. In doing so, this will also grant you the Achievement: This Thing of Ours.
Forbes
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Mafia: The Old Country' Review — A Great Game That's A Bit Too Linear
Mafia has been around for decades, but we haven't seen a new game in the video game franchise in nine years. Mafia III took place in the 60s' in a fictional version of New Orleans, marking a major departure for the series. I really enjoyed the game, though the setting and tone made it feel like a different game altogether. Mafia: The Old Country takes us back even further than the original Mafia, which was set in the 1930s, and across the Atlantic to Sicily in the year 1904 (though the game's story spans years). You take on the role of Enzo, an impoverished mine laborer who has escapes his brutal employers and, serendipitously, finds himself taken in by Don Torrisi, the head of a powerful organized crime family. You start to work you way up the ranks, taking on both trivial and extremely dangerous jobs for Torrisi and his people. Shoveling horse manure is your first job, but soon enough you're helping collect debts around the countryside or escorting Torrisi's daughter, Isabella, on a picnic. There's a forbidden love angle between Enzo and Isabella that I enjoyed a great deal, as it provides some nice tension between Enzo and his new benefactor. Eventually you'll leave the tiny room you're given at the Torrisi estate and move into grander chambers. You'll also find yourself taking out bandits, exacting revenge on enemies, and sneaking your way into nearby police offices on daring rescues. All of this is extremely linear. Mafia looks and feels a lot like one of its oldest competitors, Grand Theft Auto. It's a third-person shooter with cover mechanics, stealth, and in this case both vintage cars and horses. In fact, this iteration feels more like Red Dead Redemption than GTA at times, with its older arsenal of rifles and revolvers and knives. But unlike those games, this is not an open-world adventure. Sure, there's a big map with various locations, and the Sicily of The Old Country is absolutely stunning, but you'll do very little exploring during the campaign. I'm of two minds on this. On the one hand, this is what I expected and I've enjoyed the no-frills linearity of past games, including the original Mafia and its excellent remake. There's something refreshing about a game that just takes you through the story without a million little side-quests to do along the way. The map isn't cluttered with exclamation points. It's a great story with memorable characters and I never felt bored despite many long cutscenes and driving or walking scenes that involve a great deal of dialogue. (One handy touch is the ability to skip drives if you want). There is an exploration mode, tucked away in the main menu's Carcyclopedia, that unlocks after the prologue. You can pick a car and spawn on the map, fast-travel around, go to vendors, find collectibles and take photos at viewpoints. This is a nice feature, allowing you to free-roam, drive around, ride your horse, upgrade stuff and get a bit more mileage out of the game's world. But I would like a better balance. I don't love that this mode is tucked away in a post many could very easily mix. I don't love that the exploration portion is totally divorced from the story. In the campaign, you move from one mission to the next with basically no time to do anything between. I expected to be able to at least familiarize myself when my living quarters were upgraded, but instead of getting to walk around my apartment and maybe try on a new outfit, I was plopped into the next mission. There are vendors that buy and sell stuff, but you're introduced to these early on and then never really get a chance to go back and visit them unless you go into explore mode. I want the best of both worlds. Break up story missions with exploration segments. When a mission is over, let us do whatever we want until we go talk to the NPC that starts the mission. This wouldn't even have to be between every mission, but between a few would be nice. Have a few side missions to take on. Let us go do another race. Give us some side objectives in the various towns where we can get into some trouble, flirt with local girls, find upgrades etc. Put some bandits in the hills and let us go take them on. Allow us to customize our loadouts before each mission unless there's a good reason not to. Other than this, I really enjoyed my time with Mafia: The Old Country. I played on Steam and it ran great. I didn't experience any major bugs and even the with the graphics cranked up to the max, I was getting a great framerate (though obviously your mileage might vary). Enzo's story is compelling. The writing is solid and the characters are complex and interesting enough to care about. I really enjoyed the love story between Enzo and Isabella and the tension that created in the campaign, waiting for everything to go wrong. The score by Brian Transeau (BT) is dramatic and lovely and really helps set the tone for the game. Between the score and the setting, you really feel like you're in the Old Country. I wanted to just kick back and drink some vino and listen to music and eat fresh-baked bread. They need a 'relax in Sicily' mode. The third-person cover-shooter gunplay, while not revolutionary, is solid and fun. You have a pretty expansive array of vintage rifles, shotguns and pistols to choose from, though there isn't much in the way of crafting or upgrade options. You'll be able to upgrade some of your abilities and passive abilities with special beads and medallions. Enemies are fairly challenging, moving about and taking cover, making it a bit harder to hit them, though they have a pretty tough time hitting you as well. You'll also get into knife fights with 'boss' characters. These involve dodging, parrying, and a handful of attacks. Some enemy attacks can only be dodged, while parrying others gives you the opportunity to riposte. It's a fun mini-game, basically. The missions can feel a bit repetitive at times. Many involve sneaking into a location, silently taking down guards and, if your cover is blown, blasting your way through. Sometimes, even a successful stealth approach will end in a mandatory shootout. Some stealth portions won't let you get caught at all, forcing you to restart at a checkpoint if you're caught. These are my least favorite. More interesting combats are chases. I especially enjoyed one where you chase down kidnappers on your horse. There are also races on both horseback and in the gorgeous vintage cars you come across. The car race brought me back to the ridiculously challenging race in the original Mafia. You had to win that one or start all over and do it again…and again…and again until you won. This game's big race is far more approachable. If you don't win the first time, you'll start at a check-point near the end of the race at the head of the pack. Thank goodness. Finally, I played the game in Italian with English subtitles. I find this far more immersive and less distracting than listening to voice-actors with Italian accents. The only downside is when you're caught in some intense car chase or shootout and have to keep glancing at subtitles. Your passenger is giving you instructions on which way to turn in the race but you have to divide attention between the track and reading. I suppose you could turn it back to English for these challenging segments, but I just use it as an extra obstacle. All told, I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys a video game with a good story and setting. I love the Sicilian countryside. I love that this is set in the early 1900s. Very few games take place in this time period and it really gives it a unique feel. As a prequel of sorts to the later Mafia games, it's wonderful. It makes me want to go watch old mobster movies. You should absolutely give this one a chance, especially since it's only $50 – much cheaper than the $70 most premium titles are these days. Yes, it's a shorter game that will take most players 10 to 12 hours to complete, give or take, but I think quality is more important than quantity and I'm always thrilled to get a new single-player title that's focused rather than trying to do everything all at once. While I wish it had a bit more openness at times, I'm happy that Mafia: The Old Country gives us such a riveting story, compelling setting and characters. Score: 8.5/10
CNET
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
Mafia: The Old Country Is a Restrictive Crime Drama That Falls Short
Mafia: The Old Country, from developer Hangar 13, is the fourth entry in the Mafia franchise, which started in 2002. The open-world game series, mainly focusing on the Italian mafia's organized criminal activities in fictional US cities, came out less than a year after Grand Theft Auto III, which firmly established the open-world style of gaming. While the Mafia games didn't have the mayhem of GTA, what they offered instead was a compelling storyline that kept you glued to your controller. Mafia: The Old Country, however, doesn't have that or much else, as the game lacks so much of the substance in its big, open world that made previous games so rich and enjoyable. In The Old Country, players step into the role of Enzo, a young man who was sold to a sulfur mine in Sicily by his father to pay off his debts in 1904. Establishing the game in Italy is a departure for the series, which had previously followed mob classics like The Godfather in setting its stories in America with the fictional cities Lost Haven and Empire Bay as stand-ins for Chicago and New York City. It's a promising start, but the game's smaller scale -- its $50 pricetag suggests a more limited scope than the $70 and even $80 AAA games launching these days -- becomes apparent as the game progresses. After a collapse of the mine nearly cost him his life, Enzo escapes to a nearby vineyard owned by Don Torrisi, one of the heads of the local mafia families. The Don takes in Enzo, not because he has a compassionate heart, but the need for muscle: men from a rival family have been trespassing on his land, showing a lack of respect. Enzo starts off as one of the hired hands on the vineyard but falls deeper into the criminal underworld as the Don gives him more and more important tasks. Each chapter plays out a certain important event over the course of four years as Enzo becomes part of the Torrisi family. There is even an initiation ceremony into the family that is similar to the one depicted in other mafia films and shows like The Sopranos. The Old Country is intended to be somewhat accurate to the time period, but not so realistic that it drags down the fun. In every chapter, Enzo has to complete some tasks that usually involve a bit of driving or riding a horse somewhere, a stealth sequence, some sort of firefight, and a very dramatic knife fight that becomes formulaic. Ultimately, the game feels just so restrictive in its reliance on scripted story beats that abandon the freeform nature of earlier Mafia games. More scripted than The Godfather Trilogy One of my biggest gripes about Mafia: The Old Country is how scripted it is. There is just no semblance of freedom within the game, dictating specific experiences with the illusion of chance and randomness. For example, over the course of the game, Enzo has to compete in two races: one with a horse and the other in a car. In both cases, I screwed up early on in the competition and lagged far behind, but I progressed against the other racers with some sharp turns and not-so-legal tactics like bumping my horse into other riders. Thing is, once I passed another racer, it seemed like the game went ahead and stopped having that racer try, so I didn't really need much reason to check my tail to see if the guy I passed up was going to catch up to me because they seemed to just stop bothering. The same goes for the enemies in shootouts. They get behind some cover, and some will, for whatever reason, just walk right to you while shooting. There is no sense of urgency or concern when they get shot; they're just scripted to move forward. It's just constant through missions, where once you reach a certain point, the sequence changes on a dime with no hint of a natural transition from playing stealthy to having a firefight. 2K Games Where this was really baffling was in the areas of San Celeste where the townspeople gathered. If you're thinking about doing some typical GTA-like mayhem, well, you can forget about it. In these areas, you can't pull a gun, which is fine, but on the outskirts of these areas, you can. There is a bit of a failsafe that you can't shoot at the people, although some may react when you pull a gun out and point it at them. You can, however, throw a grenade, and the grenade doesn't do a damn thing. No injuries, no one running around, no reaction, nothing. The townspeople just stick to their script, and that's it. It's just a shame how closed off this game feels. You have all the tools to really have some fun and engage with the fantasy of being a criminal in a nearly lawless land, and the developers did pretty much everything possible to make sure you don't go off-script. Whacked by the frame rate The presentation for The Old Country has its share of issues for me. To start, I was provided with a PC code, which isn't my preferred platform to game on, and for the exact issue I came across. My desktop isn't top of the line with its GeForce RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5 3600, but it handles the newest games fine enough, and for whatever reason, I was getting constant slowdown going in and out of sequences. When I first booted up the game, it automatically set my graphics settings between mid and high, which is typical for most games, and I dealt with laggy transitions from an action sequence into a cutscene and vice versa. The Old Country does require a fair amount of power, but I never had my PC chug along this much for a new game, which makes me hope that this will be fixed in a day-one optimization patch. Another issue in the presentation was the sound editing. The voice actors did a great job in bringing their characters to life. In particular, Don Torrisi, played by Jonny Santiago, was just a thrill. As soon as Torrisi was introduced, I already felt that charisma that someone who runs a crime family would have, and when he gets pissed, you can feel it in your bones. However, in between some fine voice acting, there were some noticeable moments when I could tell that the sound editing didn't give that natural spacing you'd expect when two people are talking. There were also moments when you could hear that maybe they didn't use the best take of the line reading. 2K Games The graphics are, for a lack of a better word, fine. The character models were detailed, but not to an exceptional degree. The same could be said for the part of Sicily the game takes place. I just didn't see that one spot that had me wanting to stop everything and take a look at the land around, which is a shame given the shift from American cities to the sprawling Italian countryside. Another bright spot was the score. It was filled with different pieces that felt authentic for the time period -- symphonic strings and other classical Italian fare -- yet also dramatic and really added to those tense moments. He pulls a knife, you pull a knife, that's the San Celeste way Combat in Mafia, for the most part, is fairly standard for a third-person open-world action game that takes place in the early 1900s. It's a lot of shooting with revolvers, shotguns and rifles, with them having different stopping power, ammo capacity and accuracy. What's unique in this game is the knives. The array of blades available to the player is quite extensive, more so than the guns, and they play a big part in the game beyond combat. During the stealth sequences, Enzo uses a knife to immediately kill enemies instead of mashing a button to choke them out. There is a group of knives that he can throw to take out enemies from a distance. The blade can lose its sharpness as it's being used to open locks on doors and lockboxes, as well as killing people, so there are some knives with increased durability, which can be reset whenever you pick up a whetstone that enemies will just happen to have on them. Where the knife really comes into play are the one-on-one fights. These tend to be duels that close out a whole combat sequence and, toward the end of the game, involve more prominent characters. These fights are dramatic but nothing exceptional, satisfying a story beat but not thrilling in gameplay. For these dramatic encounters, Enzo and his enemy have their own life bar and need to slice each other up with slashes, a thrust attack to reach farther-away enemies, a power attack to break through the defenses of a blocking enemy, and a dodge and parry. If you haven't figured it out yet, this is just paper-rock-scissors, but you know, with knives -- which is fine if predictable. There are no quicktime events during the fights, just occasional breaks where Enzo and his opponent tussle around some more before it goes back into duel mode. It's all, once again, by the script, and while they can be quite dramatic, it's simply not particularly special. Maybe there were a lot of knife fights in the early days of the mafia, I have no idea, I'm not a mafia historian, but this feels like it was intended to give the combat some flair. The game takes place in the 1900s, so there are no machine guns, rocket launchers or flamethrowers, and the developers thought that giving these very dramatic sequences could help add to both the historical realism of the time while keeping it exciting. If that's the case, that notion is The Old Country's shortcoming. I have this beautiful landscape that is not really available to explore until you complete the game and unlock Explore mode. Once I do some venturing, I find there's not much to see, and in some cases, the architecture makes no sense, with stairways going up to just brick walls. I meet these interesting characters who I'd like to know more about and would be willing to spend time with, but I can't and will only see them when they're allowed during missions. It could be that my decades of playing open-world games since GTA III came out are leading me to expect so much more from an open-world game. Mafia is not GTA, and The Old Country does keep to the linear style of the first two games, but it's just so limiting. While I wasn't hoping for an RPG, a little more freedom would keep me from feeling railroaded into a single story. At least in the first Mafia game, I can get fined for speeding, while in this game, I can speed through the countryside without a worry. I would have liked to see Mafia: The Old Country give me more to sink my teeth into. This is not about length, which comes in at around 12 to 15 hours to complete, but more about having some meat on the bone. If it's about giving me a cinematic drama to play before me, then really give it to me instead of a very typical love story up until the last hour or so. My hopes were high for Mafia: The Old Country, and the game didn't satisfy. Mafia: The Old Country comes out Friday on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S for $50.
