Mafia: The Old Country

Here is a statistic that complicates this game's Mostly Positive rating. Mafia: The Old Country has fifteen sequential chapter achievements. 94.7% of players earn the first. The fifteenth still sits at 61%.

Three in five people who bought this finished it. In an era where most games are abandoned before the halfway mark — Animal Well manages 15.5%, and plenty of celebrated titles do worse — that is a remarkable number, and it tells you something the 72% score doesn't: whatever people are complaining about, they kept playing to the end.

The unfashionable decision

Hangar 13 made a linear game. No icon-strewn map, no hundred hours of side content, no crafting tree. You play Enzo Favara, a labourer pulled into a Sicilian crime family in the early 1900s, and you go where the story sends you for about twelve hours.

That deserves credit, and the setting is the payoff. Sicily in 1900 — sulphur mines, olive groves, a smoking volcano, dust and stone — is a place games have essentially never gone, and it's rendered beautifully. Even the harshest reviews concede it: "the game looks amazing, graphically," "the scenery is beautiful," "cutscenes were cinematic and well animated." The score draws the same unanimous praise. The Godfather register is hit without tipping into parody.

For its opening hours the whole thing works. The most-upvoted negative review says so directly before turning: "The first 2 hours start out great."

Then it stops trusting you

The turn is about control, and it's the most substantial criticism here.

Story appears in 73 of the hundred most-helpful English negatives — not because the writing is bad, but because of how the game delivers it. Cutscenes come up 25 times. The specific complaint, stated most crisply by a 17-hour reviewer, is that the game does "that 'you win the fight in gameplay but you lose in the cutscene'" thing. Another describes it as watching Enzo "make every stupid decision possible in this movie adaptation of a video game." A player who deliberately tested it reports that choices "sadly do not" matter.

There's an honest defence available — this is authored fiction, and authored fiction means the author decides. Red Dead Redemption 2 railroads you constantly and nobody minds, because the writing earns it. The difference is that Old Country's story is competent rather than exceptional, and competent storytelling doesn't buy you the right to overrule the player's own successes.

The middle sags

The gameplay complaints are more prosaic and more fixable. Most missions resolve into straightforward stealth — 25 mentions — with reviewers comparing it unfavourably to Assassin's Creed Shadows. A knife-duel mechanic recurs often enough to be named in 31 of the hundred negatives, and not fondly. Weapon variety is thin. Several reviewers note mechanics that appear once and are never used again, and a driving section or two that nobody enjoyed.

Then there's the not-quite-open world. There are open areas, you can buy cars and horses, and 21 reviewers mention it mainly to say they couldn't work out why. "No idea why they even let you buy cars and horses," writes one; "the game feels utterly empty," writes another. A linear game with sandbox furniture it doesn't use is worse than a linear game without it, because it advertises a freedom that isn't there.

The price is the argument

Twenty-two of the hundred negatives mention price, twenty-three mention length, and those are mostly the same reviews.

At NZ$119.95 for eleven or twelve hours with no replay value, the arithmetic is brutal, and buyers did it in public. What's telling is that this game got its first sale in June 2026 — 2K's own announcement called it "the first time since its acclaimed launch" — and is at 40% off two months later. That's a slower discount curve than Metal Gear Solid Δ managed, but it arrives at the same place: the publisher eventually agreeing with the reviewers about the number.

At NZ$71.97 the objection largely dissolves. Twelve authored hours at that price is a normal proposition, and it's the price I'd tell a reader to wait for — or better, the next one down.

Where it stands

Sentiment has recovered meaningfully. The negatives were overwhelmingly a launch phenomenon — 57 of the hundred most-helpful were posted in August 2025 alone, falling to a handful per month through 2026 and just one in July. Of the last 100 English reviews, 78 are positive, with a 14-hour median playtime that matches the game's length almost exactly.

2K and Hangar 13 have kept the lights on with community posts, two episodes of director's commentary, and the Man of Honor expansion — two new story chapters, announced for 14 August 2026. Adding authored chapters rather than a battle pass is the right instinct for this kind of game, and worth noting in a year of the opposite.

The verdict

Mafia: The Old Country earns a 7. It is a good-looking, well-scored, competently told crime story in a setting nobody else has touched, and it has the courage to be twelve hours long and stop — a thing this industry mostly forgot how to do. The completion rate says the storytelling works on the people who play it, whatever the score suggests.

It doesn't go higher because the game between the scenes is thinner than the scenes, because it keeps overruling you at the moments it should be handing you the win, and because it launched at a price that made every one of those weaknesses into a grievance. A tighter, cheaper version of exactly this game would have reviewed at least a point better.

Buy it on sale, treat it as a film you occasionally steer, and don't expect the sandbox the map implies. If what you want is a linear story game whose writing genuinely earns the railroading, Dispatch costs a third as much and is funnier.