Between Swedish developer Digital Illusions' upcoming World War II shooter Battlefield 1942 and Czech Republic-based Illusion Softworks' newly available Mafia, September's turning out to be a banner month for great driving-shooting hybrids from European companies with the word "illusion" in their name. Arriving without much prerelease hype, Mafia is a highly engaging combination of the driving and living-city elements of Grand Theft Auto III and the story-driven third-person shooting action of Max Payne. What's more, it isn't plagued by the litany of problems usually associated with ambitious games from small development houses. Mafia looks and sounds great, it's exciting, it's suitably bug-free, and, at a time when eight hours is becoming the standard length for single-player shooters, it's long. Quite simply, Mafia is one of the best games of the year.
As implied by the first paragraph of this review, comparisons between Mafia and the famous Grand Theft Auto III are inevitable. Both games take place in detailed and sprawling clockwork cities, both games involve stealing cars and avoiding the police, and both games have plots in which you navigate a criminal underworld. The comparison breaks down when the details and structure of the games' gameplay are considered, however. In much the same way that Grand Theft Auto III includes an almost-complete version of Crazy Taxi as a minigame, Mafia can be considered a generally linear third-person shooter that features a miniature version of Grand Theft Auto III. Mafia's living city, a 1930s metropolis called Lost Heaven, is almost as fully realized as Grand Theft Auto III's Liberty City. Lost Heaven's bigger, in fact, and it features plenty of vehicular and pedestrian traffic, lots of different neighborhoods, working lift bridges, a train system, and even some outlying country areas. It lacks only Liberty City's dynamic day-night cycle and weather patterns--each mission takes place at a particular time and in specific weather conditions
Minimum:
OS: Windows XP SP3
Processor: 2 GHz Intel Dual Core Processor
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800/ATI Radeon HD 2600 (256MB minimum)
DirectX «: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible
Recommended:
OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Windows 7
Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Quad Core Processor
Memory: 3 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX460/ATI Radeon HD 5850 (512MB minimum)
DirectX «: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible
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