In 2016, I attended my first and only (so far) Electronic Entertainment Expo. One of the games being shown was Mafia 3. The “booth” for it was amazing. Publisher 2K essentially recreated a small city block of New Orleans from 1968, with two-story buildings. Inside, there was a bar area, a band, and other stuff that you can see in the above video. The lineup to get into this area was hours long every single day. I made the choice to not spend a significant chunk of my time at E3 just to line up for a single “booth”, even as impressive as that one.
A few years later, I actually bought the game on sale. I tried playing it but soon realized the game was horrendously optimized. It ran very slow, even though I was using a decent video card that was produced a year after the game came out. Six years after I went to E3, I finally bought a video card that was able to run Mafia 3 at decent frame rates.
I finished the main story yesterday and while the game is not flawless, I enjoyed the story and the voice actors were top-notch. The game is set in 1968, in a fictional city in New Orleans. The main character is African-American, and the game is not afraid to show that racism was very much present in the late 60s. I suppose not much has changed unfortunately. On a happier note, the game features an amazing soundtrack, filled with about 100 songs from that era. Some of the tracks are what you might expect, like from Creedence Clearwater Revival but I couldn’t get enough of Sam Cooke songs that were included. YouTube has an almost complete playlist of the soundtrack if you’re interested.
It took six years but I’m glad I closed the loop on this game.