Mafia: The Old Country review – take or leave the cannoli

When you’re driving to a location as part of a mission in Mafia: The Old Country, you have the option of skipping the drive. Holding down the appropriate button for long enough will make the game fade to black, and then fade back in at your destination just as Enzo – our rags-to-riches protagonist – pulls in his car or horse.

The deeper into the game I got, the more this felt like an odd option to give the player. The drive to the next mission? That is the game.

The Old Country is not at its best when you’re navigating its numerous awkward stealth sections, or shooting goons, or even diving into a one-on-one knifefight with an enemy who has mutually agreed with you that stabbing is somehow more honourable than shooting.

Watch the Mafia: The Old Country gameplay trailer.

The best part is driving down the dirt roads and roughly paved streets of its beautifully rendered early 1900s Sicily, taking in the sights, navigating its tricky tight turns in your old-timey vehicle, and admiring how much detail has gone into the game’s setting.

If you’re skipping over those sections, then why are you playing?

Mafia: The Old Country – setting

‘Setting’ is really the right word, too, because Mafia’s Sicily is certainly not a classic open world playground full of secrets to discover and mischief to get up to. This is not a bad thing – in fact, it’s something I have always admired about the Mafia series, as building out a whole city to tell a single story separates the series from GTA and its ilk.

But The Old Country feels particularly on rails, a little scared to let you ever really dig down even a single layer or experience anything too far off the path it has set before you.

It has that thing that a lot of story-driven action games have, where it’ll occasionally transition into a cutscene just so that Enzo can make a bad decision or mess up in some way, then hand controls back to you so you can deal with the consequences.

Although you can buy additional cars and horses to drive/ride around on, most missions give you a specific vehicle and ask you to use it. You’re gathering money as you play, but reasons (and opportunities) to spend it are few and far between.

Mafia: The Old Country – ‘a classic mob movie’?

The official website for Mafia: The Old Country promises that the game will let you ‘play a classic mob movie’, which is true in a sense – the game’s plot is heavy on the cliches of the cinematic subgenre.

Enzo is an unfortunate sort at the game’s beginning, an indentured worker in a sulfur mine run by a particularly callous mobster. When a cave-in kills his best friend in the game’s opening minutes, Enzo’s anger boils over and, following a vicious knife fight with one of his mob employers, he finds himself on the run.

By pure luck, he soon finds himself under the protection of Don Torrisi, a rival gangster who sees Enzo’s potential as a soldier. Enzo, naturally, rises up the ranks of the organisation – while also nursing a secret infatuation with Isabella, the Don’s daughter.

Soon you’re operating out of Don Torisi’s gorgeous vineyard, a sprawling estate from which an ominously smoking distant volcano, Mt Etna, can be observed (no one could accuse this game of being subtle).

This is the base that much of the game operates out of, and the game funnels you through each new chapter without taking much time to breathe. There’s no driving to a marker on your map to activate the next mission: when one ends, the next begins.

The game is a prequel-of-sorts to the original Mafia games, serving as a loose backstory to how criminal operations in Empire Bay got started, although there’s not much in the way of shocking twists or turns – it’s cool to see a young Leo Galante, but not that cool.

The principle cast all offer great performances, at least, and as much as it leans on cliches there’s still some inherent potency to any story of a person rising up the ranks in the mafia. I am not sure that the game really has anything new to say about organised crime, or the people who are chewed up and spat out by it, but I certainly wasn’t skipping the cutscenes.

And, to its credit, the game pushes for some authenticity in how its characters speak: alongside all the slang that folks hurl your way, the voice actors make sure to pronounce names like ‘Leo’ and ‘Cesare’ properly, which is something that doesn’t always happen in stories that use Italian names.

The Old Country is an extremely repetitive game. There’s a mission structure that you’ll become very familiar with: you arrive at a location, and Enzo realises he’ll need to use stealth to clear a path, quietly, to his destination.

Once you get there, Enzo will inevitably be discovered in a cutscene, and then things go loud – you’ll swing to third-person cover-based combat at this point. At the end, generally one of two things will happen: either you’ll be pulled into a knife fight through some choreographed exposition, or one of the bad guys will escape in a car and you’ll give chase.

This is a pattern that repeats many times, and it’s somewhere between ‘a bit tedious’ and ‘oddly comforting’. If you were gaming in the Xbox 360/PS3 era, Mafia: The Old Country will feel very familiar to you, but much more splendorous. It used to feel like there were games like this coming out constantly – tight, focused single-player third-person shooters with a semi-open world and a big focus on their lacklustre story. Now, they’re a little less common.

Part of me thinks that if this game had released ten years ago, I’d be less kind to it.

Mafia: The Old Country – core gameplay pillars

Of these core gameplay pillars, stealth fares the worst. It’s all a bit basic – you sneak around, throwing bottles and coins to distract guards, watching as pairs split up and then conveniently stand facing in different directions so you can sneak up behind them and use your stealth attack to choke them out, feeling less like people to outsmart and more like obstacles to overcome.

There was never a moment in a stealth section where I felt particularly clever, or challenged, and I was always a bit relieved when I got caught out and everyone started blasting.

The gun fights in Mafia: The Old Country are solid, if overly familiar. Since the game is set over a century ago, the weapons are era-appropriate, which is a bit of fun – it does mean you’re not getting any sort of assault rifle or tommy gun, and only being able to use single-shot weapons gives the game a bit of a unique flavour.

Still, across the 12-hour playtime you’ll see a lot of the same AI routines play out, and there are very few ‘gimmicks’ in the game – most fights are just a matter of hunkering down behind cover, shooting everyone you can see from there, and then rinsing and repeating.

The knife fights, usually reserved for ‘boss’ encounters, are pretty enjoyable, if a little contrived. You can parry, dodge, slash and stab, and reading your enemy’s movements is key to winning. These fights have slightly more thematic weight: your opponent never stops bragging about their superiority until you land the killing blow, which makes your victories all the more satisfying.

Needing to pay attention to your opponent’s actions also calls attention to the game’s excellent animation. Mafia: The Old Country is a looker by every metric, even when you’re slashing desperately at an angry Italian jerk.

Mafia: The Old Country – summing up the experience

There’s a moment very early on in the game that serves as neatly illustrative of the entire experience. As he escapes the sulfur mines, Enzo muses out loud that he needs some kind of escape vehicle.

At that moment, as you run towards the stables, a horse runs out and stands on the road, waiting for you. Enzo, to be clear, does not have a horse of his own. What has prompted this horse to trot out and patiently wait for Enzo to climb aboard?

Sheer gameplay necessity. Mafia: The Old Country doesn’t mind if you can see the seams on its own stitching, as long as it doesn’t ever totally fall apart.

But its version of Sicily really is spectacular. I found myself staring at the sun setting over the bay of a small seaside village, soaking in the ambience, and thinking how amazing it is that we can have a game that has so much love and attention-to-detail poured into it, but still isn’t actually very good.

Mafia: The Old Country is competently made, beautiful, but unambitious in its structure – it’s an offer you can comfortably refuse.

Mafia: The Old Country was released on 31 July 2025 on PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC.