Skip to content
Dom Robinson reviews
Take 2 Games
- Price: £29.99
- Players: 1
- System Requirements (recom):
- Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
- Intel Pentium II 500Mhz (700Mhz)
- 96Mb RAM (128Mb)
- 16-speed CD-ROM (32-speed)
- 16Mb DirectX 8.1-compatible graphics card (32Mb)
- 1.8Gb Hard Disk Space!!
- DirectX 8.1
In short, Mafia feels like a 1930s version of Grand Theft Auto 3 – both have a strong storyline that see you as a lone drifter fall in with a bad crowd, both allow you to go beating up old ladies with a baseball bat, but both also have PC glitches when it comes to running the game.
You play Tommy Angelo, a lowly cab driver trying to make a living but it’s not long before you hear a crash and are ‘gently persuaded’ by two mobsters to drive them back to the bar owned by mafia boss Salieri. It’s a good way of getting you used to driving about, as is the next stage which sees you driving a few more people around, Crazy Taxi-style, but you actually have to stick to the speed limit here otherwise you’ll attract the wrath of the cops.
The gameplay area is a cool 12 square miles and since there’s no “Loading.. Please Wait” screens, this boon is reflected in the fact that the installation comes on three CDs and takes up a whacking 1.8Gb of hard disk space – the most I’ve ever seen for a game so far.
There are 20 missions altogether, the next two seeing you run for your life to Salieri’s bar as your taxi is attacked by those you tried to escape from in level one; and then doing a job for the big cheese himself as you drive to the back of a diner, smash up cars with a baseball bat, throw a firebomb or two and then escape back to Salieri’s. Now, I did get back after several attempts but the bloody police caught up with me as I didn’t exactly keep a low profile (my car was on the verge of breaking down and I had to steal another and – D’oh! – I picked on a sodding police car!). Still, when they cornered me I figured I’d rather torch everyone, including myself and Paulie who was with me, with a Molotov cocktail than give myself up for arrest 🙂
The one thing that looks the best in this game is the one thing that ultimately lets it down – the graphics. There are several options to tweak to get the best out of your graphics card, from the initial setup menu to the in-game options, but whether I selected low or high spec throughout, it didn’t stop the game being slow.
By slow, I mean it just took too long to get anywhere. Part of this is due to the fact that you’re driving around clapped-out bangers as opposed to high-speed sports cars in GTA3, but the graphics engine just does not allow for the smooth ride you expect from a PC game and everything just feels too “sticky” because it feels like an effort to get from A to B.
There’s also the usual hash of those moments when you get too many baddies crammed into a tiny space close up to you and they end up running about in all directions like the Marx Brothers, rather than just all standing facing you and blasting you into next week. Also, in the aforementioned “smash the cars up by the diner” level, when the baddies came out to have a look, two of them got stuck behind a car under the green tin roof and had trouble getting out, one with his head somehow poking out the top! Bizarre.
The sound is fine – shouting, gunshots and twee 30s music in the background, while the gameplay is dependent on how fast/slow the screen is running at the time as it can be quite infuriating when you just don’t feel like you’ve got the control of your character or car that you need.
It’s difficult to know whether to stick with the game in the hope that it’ll get better because I loved GTA3 and it follows similar lines, but the execution is just not what it could be. The levels can be quite long and while some are split up into individual segments, you can’t save part-way through so if you screw it up then it’s back to the last ‘checkpoint’.
Also, it’s taking up about 2Gb of hard drive space – I’m sure some of the FMV scenes could’ve stayed on the CD-ROM or at least offered this option. In fact, why do games still need to come on several CD-ROMs? Many of us have DVD-ROMs in our PCs now so when will manufacturers take advantage of this and issue a single DVD-ROM disc? One or two have previously, but it’s far from widespread.
Hmmm.. oh, go on then. Time to join the Mafia one more time… and then one more time after that… and then.. oh look, dawn.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL 
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.