Latest news with #TheOldCountry
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mafia: The Old Country review – by-numbers action game is elevated by Sicilian period setting
Once upon a time, the industry was drowning in games like this. Single-player, story-led action experiences with a weekend's worth of choreographed set pieces and an open world glazed with a fine mist of collectibles … But here in 2025, the age of the Battle Pass and live service forever games, Hangar 13's solo adventure about Sicilian crime families feels almost as dated as its 1900s setting. In fact, The Old Country has few new ideas to contribute to the cover shooter genre, nor to the Mafia series itself. Hangar 13 already produced a remake in 2020 of the original Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, but in this game it often feels like the studio's remaking it yet again in a different setting. Both the storyline and structure of its individual missions seem to be at the very least giving a reverential nod of the fedora to that 2002 title. Case in point: the 'win a race to impress your Don' mission trope. This chapter was infamous in the original Mafia because the 1930s race cars were extremely hard to handle and the race was all but unwinnable, but it was also a sophisticated multi-stage mission structure full of sabotage, theft and unexpected double-crossings. Mafia: The Old Country simply has you riding out to a town where a race is due to take place, then tells you the Don needs a replacement rider and drops you into the saddle for an uneventful canter around a course that features no real challenge. Ten years ago, such a by-the-numbers experience would have been criticised, but right now the scarcity of games like this means you're inclined to look past the basic mission design and enjoy its strongest assets instead: its story, and its sense of time and place. It's 1904 and you are Enzo Favara, an unfortunate young man with no family to speak of who finds himself working down in the sulphur mines with his fellow carusi in their yellow-stained rags and shaven heads. After working conditions at the mine tip past horrific and into fatal, Enzo stands up to his sadistic employers and makes a powerful enemy in Don Ruggero Spadaro, the local 'businessman' who owns the mine. Not to worry, though – after fleeing, he's taken in by Don Torrisi, a rival of Spadaro's, who appreciates the young man's bravery and work ethic. You can see where this is going. What follows is your typical ascendancy through the ranks of a crime family, expressed through the medium of knife fights and old timey shootouts, in the era when reloading a pistol takes three to five days. Local businesses refuse to pay up. Workers go on strike. Bandits and rival families threaten your reputation. You journey to a locale that's conveniently littered with waist-high cover, hunker down and set to them. In fairness to Enzo and his associates, missions aren't always about all-out violence. At times you're sneaking around, distracting guards by throwing coins and bottles to lure them away from your path. There's a lot of riding horses and driving cars and plenty of expository chat to deepen the context of your actions either side of the fracas. These mechanics outside combat are not especially exciting, but this is a mafia game. It's not trying to be a deep, systems-laden experience – it just wants to tell you a gangster story. And by the skin of its teeth, it succeeds in that endeavour. But it does so via premise rather than plot. The beats are predictable. The memorable moments aren't clever lines of dialogue or dramatic denouements, but vivid historical details. Pheasants strung up in pantries, baskets of citrus fruit piled high in fields. Workers stamping on grapes in the Torrisi vineyard. Historically accurate recipes for spezzatino di maiale on kitchen counters. The Sicilian dialect peppered throughout each conversation (I heartily recommend going all-in and changing to Sicilian audio localisation with English subtitles). Here is a game that has done its research, and brought to life a geographical and historical setting previously unvisited by games. And done it so well that it proves to be Mafia: The Old Country's saving grace. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion It's hard to make the case that its knife fights and shootouts are anything more than functional, and its missions feel slightly too straightforward to befit a franchise once known for its sublime changes of pace. But even with those caveats in mind, it's still absolutely worth playing for the richness of its setting, and the infectious enthusiasm it has for its grim subject matter. Mafia: The Old Country is out now, £49.99
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mafia: The Old Country review – by-numbers action game is elevated by Sicilian period setting
Once upon a time, the industry was drowning in games like this. Single-player, story-led action experiences with a weekend's worth of choreographed set pieces and an open world glazed with a fine mist of collectibles … But here in 2025, the age of the Battle Pass and live service forever games, Hangar 13's solo adventure about Sicilian crime families feels almost as dated as its 1900s setting. In fact, The Old Country has few new ideas to contribute to the cover shooter genre, nor to the Mafia series itself. Hangar 13 already produced a remake in 2020 of the original Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, but in this game it often feels like the studio's remaking it yet again in a different setting. Both the storyline and structure of its individual missions seem to be at the very least giving a reverential nod of the fedora to that 2002 title. Case in point: the 'win a race to impress your Don' mission trope. This chapter was infamous in the original Mafia because the 1930s race cars were extremely hard to handle and the race was all but unwinnable, but it was also a sophisticated multi-stage mission structure full of sabotage, theft and unexpected double-crossings. Mafia: The Old Country simply has you riding out to a town where a race is due to take place, then tells you the Don needs a replacement rider and drops you into the saddle for an uneventful canter around a course that features no real challenge. Ten years ago, such a by-the-numbers experience would have been criticised, but right now the scarcity of games like this means you're inclined to look past the basic mission design and enjoy its strongest assets instead: its story, and its sense of time and place. It's 1904 and you are Enzo Favara, an unfortunate young man with no family to speak of who finds himself working down in the sulphur mines with his fellow carusi in their yellow-stained rags and shaven heads. After working conditions at the mine tip past horrific and into fatal, Enzo stands up to his sadistic employers and makes a powerful enemy in Don Ruggero Spadaro, the local 'businessman' who owns the mine. Not to worry, though – after fleeing, he's taken in by Don Torrisi, a rival of Spadaro's, who appreciates the young man's bravery and work ethic. You can see where this is going. What follows is your typical ascendancy through the ranks of a crime family, expressed through the medium of knife fights and old timey shootouts, in the era when reloading a pistol takes three to five days. Local businesses refuse to pay up. Workers go on strike. Bandits and rival families threaten your reputation. You journey to a locale that's conveniently littered with waist-high cover, hunker down and set to them. In fairness to Enzo and his associates, missions aren't always about all-out violence. At times you're sneaking around, distracting guards by throwing coins and bottles to lure them away from your path. There's a lot of riding horses and driving cars and plenty of expository chat to deepen the context of your actions either side of the fracas. These mechanics outside combat are not especially exciting, but this is a mafia game. It's not trying to be a deep, systems-laden experience – it just wants to tell you a gangster story. And by the skin of its teeth, it succeeds in that endeavour. But it does so via premise rather than plot. The beats are predictable. The memorable moments aren't clever lines of dialogue or dramatic denouements, but vivid historical details. Pheasants strung up in pantries, baskets of citrus fruit piled high in fields. Workers stamping on grapes in the Torrisi vineyard. Historically accurate recipes for spezzatino di maiale on kitchen counters. The Sicilian dialect peppered throughout each conversation (I heartily recommend going all-in and changing to Sicilian audio localisation with English subtitles). Here is a game that has done its research, and brought to life a geographical and historical setting previously unvisited by games. And done it so well that it proves to be Mafia: The Old Country's saving grace. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion It's hard to make the case that its knife fights and shootouts are anything more than functional, and its missions feel slightly too straightforward to befit a franchise once known for its sublime changes of pace. But even with those caveats in mind, it's still absolutely worth playing for the richness of its setting, and the infectious enthusiasm it has for its grim subject matter. Mafia: The Old Country is out now, £49.99
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Can't get away this summer? Mafia: The Old Country brings the Sicilian countryside to you, with a side of Michael Corleone-style action
Mafia: The Old Country (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £44.99) Verdict: The Midfather Rating: Remember that bit in The Godfather where Al Pacino runs off to Sicily? It's all hilltop villages, sunbaked vineyards and casual murder. Now imagine That Bit in The Godfather: The Game. Because that is what the latest entry in the Mafia series delivers. After games set in a knockoff version of New York, a knockoff version of Chicago and a knockoff version of New Orleans, it too has returned to the homeland. But these organised criminals don't do copyright violations, so you're not actually playing as The Godfather's Michael Corleone. Instead, you're Enzo, a down-on-his-luck, early-20th-century kid working in a dangerous sulphur mine in the shadow of, yes, a knockoff version of volcanic Mount Etna. Pretty soon, though, he leaves that life behind and falls in with the nicer of the area's two local crime families. From then on, it's rising up the ranks, falling in love with the don's daughter, getting betrayed, the usual. As an evocation of time and place, few games rival Mafia: The Old Country. Its world is so achingly beautiful that you'll want to just wander around, marvelling at the skyscapes and marketplaces. The problem is that you can't. Where previous Mafia games had relatively open worlds, this one — at least in its main story mode — just wants to keep you on the critical path. It's one stealth section or knife fight or shootout after another. And that central gameplay is just... fine, really. Good enough that you'll breeze through The Old Country's cliché-ridden story in about a dozen hours. But not so good that you'll ever return for more. Consider it an offer you can refuse.
Metro
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Mafia: The Old Country PS5 review - keep your enemies closer
The fourth Mafia game is a prequel to the whole series, set in Sicily at the turn of the 20th century, and featuring some amazing graphics and performances. In a world where Dragon Age is now treated as a dead franchise and it's 14 years since The Elder Scrolls got a mainline sequel, the Mafia franchise seems to have led a charmed life. Despite never excelling either critically or commercially it's been going since 2002, with a steady stream of sequels, remasters, and remakes. Who's asking for any of this we don't know, to the point where the game itself almost feels like a front for the mafia, but the series is nothing if not consistent. The Mafia games are often mistaken for GTA clones, but they only share a superficial similarity with Rockstar's epics. Although they do have the semblance of an open world there's nothing to really do in them and the story progression is entirely linear. Which isn't a criticism, but it is one easy way for newcomers to the franchise to become disappointed – although there are plenty of others too. These issues are clearly not unknown to developer Hangar 13, which incorporates some of original series creator Illusion Softworks. The Old Country sensibly does away with any pretence of an open world, but while its story does have some narrative weight it feels even less interactive than usual. Mafia 3 had the most expensive attempt at an open world, but that only made it even more irritating to play through, which is a shame as its storytelling is excellent and would've got far more attention if it had been part of a better game. The Old Country seems to acknowledge this by decreasing the level of interactivity to such a low level it's almost like the third person shooter equivalent of a visual novel. The best thing The Old Country has going for it is the excellent graphics and unusual setting of 1900s Sicily. However, while Mafia 3's story dealt with heady issues of racism and intolerance (it focused on the Black Mafia, rather than Italian Americans), The Old Country isn't quite so daring. To its credit, its examination of why good people are driven to do bad things is not superficial, as it shows how poverty, peer pressure, and toxic masculinity sends protagonist Enzo Favara into a spiral of criminality from which he never escapes. Literally, because while this is supposed to be interactive entertainment his fate is predestined the moment you start the game. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. It takes the game precious little time to start ripping off paying homage to characters from The Godfather. It's done with relatively subtlety – this isn't GTA 3 era Rockstar Games – but if you've any interest in The Old Country's there's little chance you haven't see the films and so the various pastiches stand out like a memberberry moment from Star Wars. In any case, Enzo joins the mob, gains a father figure, and falls in love with the Don's daughter. Oaths are taken, feuds are started, and crimes are committed. What makes The Old Country so strange though is that while the plot is by-the-number the writing and acting is very good, and well up to par with Mafia 3. It all takes a while to get going, and Enzo is so laconic it's difficult to empathise with him at first, but the characters are three-dimensional and believable. The problem is not so much that the story is cliché because it's knock-off of famous mafia movies, but because it feels overly reminiscent of previous Mafia games, which had already farmed those same films for inspiration. What you're left with is a copy of a copy and no matter how well acted it is, that's a serious issue. An even bigger problem is that as a video game, and particularly as a third person shooter, The Old Country is completely uninteresting. The gunplay is a mild improvement on Mafia: Definitive Edition but it's still completely unremarkable. The driving is worse, while the stealth sections, and instant fail situations, are the sort of thing that makes the beginning of Star Wars Outlaws seem like Metal Gear Solid. More Trending The only gameplay element that's above average is the enemy AI, which does a good job of trying to outflank you and is always on the offence. But that's nowhere near enough to excuse how dull and frustrating the game is for most of the time. The knife fights that end so many of the sections are also fun at first, although the excuses for why the various people don't just shoot you when they have the chance become ever more unlikely. In terms of presentation, The Old Country is absolutely top notch, from the graphics to the voice-acting, but as both a game and a story it struggles to keep your attention. And that's despite the fact that it's only around 12 hours long. Although, and we have to hand it to Take-Two on this one, its price does reflect that. Hangar 13 clearly enjoy what they do, and there must presumably be plenty of fans that do too. The game's lack of interactivity is not necessarily a problem, but the fact that it sacrifices so much of what being a video games is in order to tell a story that's been told many times before, including by the series itself, is just not a price worth paying. In Short: The most cinematic entry in the series so far but no matter how good the visuals or acting are, the story is clichéd and predictable, and the gameplay feels like barely an afterthought. Pros: The graphics are excellent, and the script and voice-acting are just as impressive. Surprisingly good enemy AI during combat. Cons: The plot is predictable and formulaic even compared to other Mafia games, while the characters remain largely uninteresting for far too long. Banal gameplay and an almost completely uninteractive game world. Score: 5/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: £44.99Publisher: 2KDeveloper: Hangar 13Release Date: 8th August 2025 Age Rating: 18 Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: BioShock 4 is definitely happening 'without question' says Take-Two boss MORE: Extremely rare Xbox game is being sold for over £1,000 – do you own a copy? MORE: New Lego Batman game will be revealed at Gamescom claims rumour
The Review Geek
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Review Geek
Mafia: The Old Country Guide: 'Chapter 2 – Palio' Walkthrough & Collectibles
Mafia: The Old Country Guide: Chapter 2 – Palio After learning the ropes around the estate, Mafia: The Old Country returns with Enzo ready to start a new day. To begin with, approach the horse and ride with Luca. Eventually you'll stop and will need to grab the crate from the back of the wagon. There's not a whole lot else to see so grab the crate and wait by the gates for Luca. When he approaches, interact with the gate to head on inside and trigger another cutscene. Hold Square (X) to open the crate and receive 200 Dinari. Dinari is Mafia's in-game's currency, which is gained from looting bodies, ransacking safes and opening lockboxes. This can, in turn, be used to purchase better weapons, vehicles and outfits from the wardrobe, so it's definitely worth getting as much money as you can. Buy a Knife Back to top ↑ Behind Luca you'll find a stairwell. Go down and enter Pasquale's shop. Just to the left of the entrance you'll find your first Mystery Fox. Unfortunately, you won't be able to buy this little guy right now as it costs 5000 Dinari. However, remember this spot for later and return when you can. Just to the left of the fox is a work table with knives on. Knives come in different varieties within The Old Country, and are split between: Scannaturi (which can perform Knife Throw takedowns from a distance). Rasolu (which allow Takedowns during combat). Stiletoo (which have great durability). Choose the one you want, and before leaving, be sure to circle the shop and grab the Note: The Sicilian Triacria next to Pasquale. The Knife Fight Back to top ↑ When you step out the shop, Luca will encourage you to get involved in a knife fight with your new weapon. On top of what we've already been taught, there are a couple of new mechanics added that we'll learn. After landing 5 hits on Luca, you'll learn how to Parry. Many fights from here on out will include parrying, so hit Square (X) just as an opponent is looking to slash to leave them vulnerable to a counter attack. Strikes can't be parried (highlighted by a red Square showing next to the opponent's knife) so you'll also need to dodge those too. Finally, breaking a guard with R1 (RB) will help give you the edge in fights when an opponent has their hands up to block. With these mechanics nailed, fight with Luca until he's nearly out of HP to complete this section. Head back to your horse and ride with Luca up to Palio. Head to the Torrisi race tent Back to top ↑ After hopping off your horse, you'll have a large area to navigate. Just next to the tent with blue flags and the man outside, you'll find Note – Racing Odds on the table. Keep hugging the right side of the area until you come to a stage. You'll find Cantastoria's Tale – The Bandit Prince on a bench next to a sign. On the left of this area, near the wooden steps to the left of the Torrisi race tent, you'll find Charm: Fortunato. Finally, head for the tent (your objective marker) but just before you interact with the door, make sure you grab the Newspaper: Floods in Europe on the wooden worktop (both collectibles can be seen in this picture). The Big Race Back to top ↑ Well, this is familiar isn't it? Riding for the Don in a big race that affects the Don's opinion of you? And you have to win to proceed? Count me in! The race itself involves a hose rather than a race car but the rules are largely the same. There are 9 riders and you'll need to navigate two laps of this twisty-turny course and win to proceed. The race itself is quite straightforward, just make sure you use your Spurs during the straight sections, and hug the corners to cut across riders whenever you can. You can't ram other horses off the track like you can the race cars but you can force them wide around corners. Isabella and the Knife Fight Back to top ↑ After winning the race, there will be quite a long section with Isabella where you'll need to carry a crate with her before fending off some thugs (which absolutely is not similar to the mission in Mafia 1 where you walked Sarah Angelo home). Eventually you'll be attacked by L'Ombra, triggering another knife fight. Knife Fight – L'Ombra Back to top ↑ It's now time to put everything we've learned into practice. Remember your training with Luca and make sure you play defence more here. The best strategy is to use parries and counter with 3 slashes each time. You can also break his guard with R1 (RB) when you're near and he's circling with his left arm up. Be patient here and don't recklessly swing into unblockable strikes. Eventually, he'll go down and it'll trigger another cutscene. In doing so, you'll also gain the Achievement: Forza San Celeste for completing the chapter.
