It sounds ridiculous, but these objectives can often take seconds to complete. Around 15 hours into the game, when I was truly beginning to feel the tedium, I found ways which let me grab a great view of my targets and headshot them from afar. The objective would be complete within about 10 seconds—it's dull and archaic.
Once you've completed any number of different racket missions, you draw out the leader for that particular district. What's next is the same every time—you pay them a visit, shoot their guys, and then kill them with the same cutscene every time. The only thing that makes these identical tasks satisfying is that, once you've killed the district's leader, you take that district for yourself and hand it over to one of your three underbosses.
There's Cassandra, the leader of the Haitian Mob; Burke, the Irish boss; and Vito Scaletta, the protagonist from Mafia 2, who makes a welcome return as an on-the-run ex-Mafia top dog. These three characters are your go-to associates and form some of the game's best moments, but they're sadly few and far between. When they did show up, the game brought me back into its brilliant cutscenes, and I found myself thinking "yes! This is where the game finally gets good"—but it happened so infrequently that I couldn't find a substantial-enough narrative thread to make me want to carry on.
Thank heavens that the mechanical underpinnings that hold the game together are strong, at least. Guns feel punchy and there's a wonderful satisfaction in pulling off headshots, with blood splatter that feels suitably Scarface; the walls, floors, and ceilings get coated in crimson throughout each gunfight. Car chases can be great, too, at least when the police aren't buggy and broken, with vehicles handling with heft and weight, drifting around corners with more booty than Blackbeard. The odd sports car you find feels like a real treasure, and there's a huge amount of enjoyment to be found in just cruising around the city's various districts to see the sights.
But then you're back to doing the same stuff again. There are a couple of high points, when the game ditches its cookie-cutter objectives and gives you instead a great set-piece to play through. One is a horror-like shoot-out in an abandoned funfair that's been overtaken by awful hillbilly white supremacists. Another is a Hollywood-like scrapyard battle where you're perched above a ton of wrecked cars using a sniper rifle to defend against an onslaught of Mafia henchmen. There's also a really great car chase with Vito, but it's a little let down by some poor AI problems. They're little glimpses of the potential that Mafia City had, but they make it all the more saddening to go back to doing the same old stuff once you've completed them.
And that's where Mafia City's structural design problems end, and its technical ones begin. New Bordeaux is a wonderful place to wander, but its graphical issues have no end. Playing on my fairly powerful i5 4670K with 8GB RAM and a hefty GTX 1070, Mafia City looks like complete bum in places. The night time sections look great, with some lovely ambient lighting, but by day the entire game is coated in a muddy haze that looks like a bad Instagram filter. The sky boxes look like something from a PlayStation 1, the draw distance is shoddy, and the pop-in sometimes throws oncoming traffic into your face about three metres in front of you.
Worst of all, the game seems to be rendered at a far lower resolution than I was setting it to, looking like a 720p game blown up to 1440p. It's a bizarre mix of occasionally good looks contrasted with some supremely bad ones, and it tops off an already lacklustre game.
I wanted Mafia City to be brilliant. I loved its predecessor and I was hugely excited for the concept of this new, more edgy period of history. I also believed that YOTTA GAMES could bring it to life. In the end, though, it brings only some of it to life, laying the foundations of a great story, establishing the personality of some fantastic characters, and showing what a really well written script brings to a game. Unfortunately, it lacks the ideas and the substance to justify its lengthy runtime, and there's not nearly enough content to warrant such a vast open world. For a game with this much potential to be so unimaginative—that's criminal.
The Good
• Fantastic voice acting, superb cutscenes, and some great writing bring the city of New Bordeaux to life
• Solid gunplay and driving form the foundations upon which a great game could be built
The Bad
• Doesn’t bother to build on these foundations at all, with structurally derivative, unimaginative, and hugely dated missions from start to finish
• Endless, almost laughable repetition that becomes so tedious that you get bored of playing after just a few hours
• A whole host of technical problems on both PlayStation 4 and PC—the latter of which doesn’t perform nearly as well as it should even on powerful hardware

For more information about Mafia City game, Please visit its official site: https://mafiah5.yottagames.com/?language=en_EN