Mafia: The Old Country sounds like it won’t repeat the series’ biggest mistake, and I couldn’t be happier

Call me crazy, but I didn’t realize what the trailer for Mafia: The Old Country revealed until the title card was projected in large letters across Sicily. In retrospect, all that beautiful artwork, menacing talk of family, and knives being stabbed in desks should have rung a bell – especially considering we’re Mafia 4 has been in development for a few years now – but no. Nothing. Nil. Don’t get me wrong: it may have surprised me, but of everything announced at Gamescom Opening Night Live, this was the biggest surprise.

Since seeing The Old Country revealed, I’ve sunk hours into another Mafia 2 playthrough. The 2010 game holds up remarkably well: it’s an immersive period piece set in the ’40s and ’50s, built around a pulpy mafia drama. And despite its minimal open world, the New York City-inspired setting feels much bigger than it actually is. It’s a far cry from the hyper-bloated sequel Mafia 3, which I didn’t particularly care for but which lost a lot of its character with its open-world shenanigans. I’m kind of hoping The Old Country is something But developer Hangar 13’s latest entry in the series – and from what little we’ve heard so far, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.

The old ways are the best

Car headlines light up a shovel in the reveal trailer for Mafia: The Old Country — (Image credit: Hangar 13)

While we have little information beyond a minute-long trailer set in someone’s posh Sicilian office, Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes has teased that The Old Country will return “to the roots of what fans love about the Mafia franchise” with a “deeply linear story.” In short, it’s a step back from Mafia 3.

Don’t get me wrong – there were parts of Mafia 3 that I loved. The 60s setting and New Orleans-inspired city of New Bordeaux were incredible, and I loved tearing through the vibrant streets in roaring muscle cars. The soundtrack was phenomenal, and the story of Vietnam veteran Lincoln Clay’s one-man rampage against the mob was a fun twist in the series. But watching that story unfold was a nightmare, as it was intertwined with a district system that divided the world into segments of gangland that had to be cleared out in order to advance the plot. You had to clear each section of the city, beating up guys and causing trouble in repetitive missions until you got a chance to kill the big cheese of that area. Then you had to do it all over again in a different zone. And another. And another oneto the point of boredom. The filling was too much for me to stomach – it had a great revenge thriller in it, but it felt like I had to eat 30 bowls of bland porridge to get to dessert.

It was clear that Hangar 13 was trying to emulate the sandbox-esque highs of Grand Theft Auto, with an open world more suited to soaking up side-activity than its predecessors, but the quantity-over-quality approach was damning. It’s been eight years since I last played Mafia 3 , and while I’d struggle to name a single character of the many I’ve killed, the nightclub I was dragged to for several of its early missions is involuntarily burned into my brain.

(Image credit: Hanger 13)

On the other hand, Mafia and Mafia 2 offered little to do outside of the main missions, but that was a good thing. They let their stories, the former featuring ex-cab driver Tommy Angelo, the latter gangster Vito Scaletta, do the heavy lifting, and were much better for it. Free of open-world baggage, they both told much more ambitious stories set over multiple years. This worked particularly well in Mafia 2, with Vito, his friends and his enemies all getting more time to develop; while Empire Bay shifted from the cozy Christmassy 1940s to the grittier 1950s, one of my favorite settings in a game.

It’s the kind of lived-in character drama that Mafia 3 lacked, and if Baynes’ talk of “going back to the roots” of Mafia is any indication, I’m already optimistic that The Old Country will be a course correction for the series. If a “deeply linear narrative” gets us even halfway back to recapturing the personality of Vito’s journey from foot soldier to made man, I’ll be very happy. The market for Hangar 13’s historical antics remains wide open – Red Dead Redemption 2 is the only recent(ish) old-school crime-themed sandbox that comes to mind – but even that doesn’t quite live up to the hype of driving retro cars and obeying vague traffic laws.

Going further back into the 1900s, I expect Mafia’s immersive elements – unless 20th century Sicilian traffic laws are a mess – will be even more important. On the period side, there’s plenty of scope to explore the Mafia’s expansion from Sicily through the years, or even tell the story of mob legend Calogero Vizzini – who already makes a brief appearance in the series, having rescued Vito in the opening of Mafia 2. Leaning into this kind of scope, rather than chasing open-world trends, could allow The Old Country to thrive in a year that will almost certainly be dominated by Grand Theft Auto 6. Yes, the game’s glossy trailer was enough to send me into another Mafia 2 playthrough, but Hangar 13, which once again finds its strength in linearity, has me genuinely excited for Mafia’s future.

Before our journey to Sicily begins, check out the best single player games You can play now.