Mafia III Was Part of a Daring but Short-Lived Moment in Mainstream Games

By Grace Benfell | August 14, 2025 | 1:08pm

Video Games Features Mafia

Mafia III Was Part of a Daring but Short-Lived Moment in Mainstream Games

Mafia: The Old Country returns the franchise to its roots and trims the excesses that made Mafia III sometimes frustrating. I’m hoping to put some time into it soon. But Mafia III still feels like a part of a daring moment in big budget games, where sharp political explorations felt more possible. It is part of a wave of games like Watch Dogs 2 and Assassin’s Creed: Origins which, despite their flaws, were serious attempts to engage with class and race.

Mafia’s influences are principally the usual suspects. The sepia hue of The Old Country pulls directly on the Godfather Part II. The criminal glamour of Mafia and Mafia II is centered on a noir mood. While Mafia III feels just as entrenched in those influences, it also pulls on the boundary-pushing cinema of the 1970s. Its premise, where a Black Vietnam vet uses his experiences as a CIA operative to destroy white power, is a direct pull from The Spook Who Sat By The Door—just swap the United States government for the Italian mob. The game has an obvious relationship to the Blaxploitation films of the same period. But it also, in a move I haven’t seen any other game duplicate, has a documentary format. It uses actual archival footage mixed with eerie approximations. It gives the game a ripped-from-the-headlines thrill and also grounds it in a real political moment.

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But what makes Mafia III remarkable is its emotional force. Protagonist Lincoln Clay, voiced by actor Alex Hernandez, is a legitimately fascinating character, far from a mere player surrogate. The game takes its time before kicking off its revenge plot, letting you grow fond of Clay’s family and friends before hurting or killing them all. Even when it leverages typical revenge beats, it has a cathartic power unmatched by most games.

Mafia III’s principle weakness is its open world. There is no shortage of things to do, but most of them feel the same. There are only so many times you can blast away criminal gangs in anonymous warehouses before it feels stale. Furthermore, engaging with the open world mechanics is wound up with the main narrative. This is not optional tedium. The impulse to make the open world an essential part of the game’s design, rather than mere set dressing, is an admirable one. But Mafia III doesn’t have the variety to make it sing. The game still feels split between linear main missions and open world shenanigans. It’s just that you will be wrenched from the game’s best parts to wade through its worst.

Mafia: The Old Country

This is one of the lessons that Mafia: The Old Country took from its predecessor. It has no open world elements and is instead a 13-hour “cinematic” adventure. It’s easy to imagine how Mafia III would have benefited from this format. Its main missions are gripping and propulsive, while its side missions are staid and familiar.

However, Mafia III’s open world is an awesome purveyor of mood. The nighttime is particularly fantastic. The gleam of the Bayou, distant lights shining over muddy water, gunfire crackling in parking lots where the headlights of black cars fade into abyssal darkness. And Lincoln Clay is a stylish and charismatic protagonist. When you glide down main street in a suit and a jet black German car, it has a pleasure that few games of its kind can match. It’s a game that feels effortlessly, genuinely cool.

I don’t mean to suggest that The Old Country is a step back by returning to a more traditional mob story. It is a common mistake to suggest that works centered on Black characters are definitionally about race, while works with white characters are absent of racial politics altogether. Watching Goodfellas for the first time, I was struck with how blistering its gender politics were. For a film that is often painted as fraternity fair, a glowing glamorization of masculine violence, it spends a lot of time with its women. Karen Hill, played with fierce energy by Lorraine Bracco, is one of the film’s thorniest characters. In between Ray Liotta’s crime drama, the film lingers on her and her fellow mafia wives. She is part of a community of women cut off from the rest of the world, but also barely able to talk with each other. It is a familiar plight for a house wife, heightened by her husband’s occupation. The isolating, white world of Goodfellas is not uncritical, but instead features directly into its portrait of dehumanization. I’ve been too busy with other assignments to dive into The Old Country, but I don’t want to assume the game is less cutting because it has a different subject.

Nevertheless, in the intervening 10 years, I’m not sure that any other game has picked up where Mafia III left off, at least not at its scale. It’s a mockumentary crime drama with political bite. It centers Black politics without apology and sometimes with a bloody relish. It stands apart in the middle of a long-running franchise, which has since refocused on something more familiar. I want more games like it, but I don’t know where we will get them.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.