The game has a bunch of fresh ideas, execution is lacking in several aspects. Combat is lackluster, dialog if often wildly departed from what you're offered to say. Reputation is basically rolling the dice all the time, crime is about the same. Saving is utterly limited yet the game creates insane amounts of savegames, making it incompatible with GOG.
The game is visually exceptional, the audio underscores it beautifully. The game lives through implicit storytelling which is still a nice break from games outright throwing their script at you. It's very short and some of the puzzles are annoyingly obscure because of the camera angle. The controls are so-so, oftentimes you'll trigger switches without intending to.
You know, some years after release, you expect a game to generally work well. A launcher that keeps complaining my hardware isn't enough because it's too new, a game that needs to be run in compatibility mode so it works fullscreen, that's already enough for a low rating. Now add game systems being chucked in carelessly like car chases in trucks with your only option being faster than an endless deluge of police cars and you have a mediocre experience. The core game is alright. The scenario is fresh, the gameplay loop is just okay, nothing new. Mafia never was a good series in that respect and only ran on atmosphere, so some QoL improvements here go some way towards a decent game. The rest however drags it back down.
The whole setup is old timey GTA, but without any of the open world. The entire city is just there so you have places to drive from and to. Graphics are dated, Definitive or not. Traffic is horrendously basic, good thing the police are hardly relevant. Story is okay, sometimes rather dumb, but with some charm to it. A lot seems superficial or rushed.
It's a shooter with some melee in it, most of the game melee is a bad idea. It's got the whole attributes system like in borderlands but it's entirely inconsequential on normal difficulty. You get some trash talk to laugh about half the time and just skip the other half. The writers missed the opportunity to get into the whole 80s vibe the game has at times. Most of the environments are just walking back and forth, so it's a lot of filler, not much killer. Enemy types are not very distinguishable. Most of your skills are useless, you're just mashing LMB. The game is >50% meaningless side grind, maybe that's useful on idiotic difficulty settings. The Co-Op is tacked on in ways that just constantly piss off the other players, it clearly wasn't designed for multiplayer. Get it while it's really, really cheap, it's far from worth the asking price.
