| Mafia: The Old Country | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Mafia: The Old Country is a third-person action-adventure set in 1900s Sicily. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Mafia: The Old Country Review Overview
What is Mafia: The Old Country?
Mafia: The Old Country is a gripping mob saga set in the harsh, unforgiving world of 1900s Sicily. Players take on the role of Enzo, a young miner hardened by years of exploitation, now determined to rise through the ranks of the Torrisi crime family—no matter the cost.
Mafia: The Old Country features:
⚫︎ Story Driven Mob Drama
⚫︎ Linear Structure
⚫︎ Period Accurate Weapons and Vehicles
⚫︎ Collectibles With Passive Quirks
⚫︎ Sicilian Environment
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Mafia: The Old Country's gameplay and story.
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
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| Price | $49.99 | |||||||
Mafia: The Old Country Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Great Narrative Pace Excellent Writing and Direction Memorable Characters |
Visuals Look Dated Limited Replayability |
Mafia: The Old Country Overall Score - 86/100
Mafia: The Old Country doesn’t just wear the skin of a classic—it earns its place in the family. Strong writing, phenomenal voice work, and a standout lead performance bring its story to life, while its gameplay foundation offers a satisfying if somewhat conservative loop of tension and release. Visual hiccups and the lack of incentive for replays weigh it down slightly, but the experience as a whole feels premium, polished, and meaningful. For fans of crime dramas or narrative-led action games, this one’s an offer worth taking.
Mafia: The Old Country Story - 10/10
The narrative in The Old Country is absolutely top-tier. Enzo is a compelling lead, complex, burdened, and believable. The plot never loses sight of its emotional throughline, even when things get explosive. Pacing is tight across its 10-12 hour runtime, and the game avoids wasting time on filler. Narrative peaks feel earned, never forced, and they stay true to the internal logic of the world.
Mafia: The Old Country Gameplay - 8/10
Gameplay strikes a satisfying rhythm between stealth, shootouts, and story, with solid cover mechanics and reactive enemies keeping tension high. Driving feels weighty in all the right ways, and the mission design makes good use of the city’s geography. However, for all its polish, The Old Country could’ve used a few extra features, like a New Game+, to give players more reason to revisit. It’s expertly made, but leans traditional, playing it safe where it could’ve taken risks.
Mafia: The Old Country Visuals - 7/10
There’s clear artistry in The Old Country’s environments—sun-drenched courtyards, crumbling stone villages. The visual presentation gets the atmosphere right, but the fidelity feels dated. Character designs are a little inconsistent and some animations lean stiff or awkward. On a technical level, performance is stable on the Xbox, but frame dips and texture pop-ins still occur occasionally.
Mafia: The Old Country Audio - 9/10
The orchestral score knows exactly when to swell and when to vanish into silence, letting tension simmer. Gunshots and tires screech with weight, and ambient noise fills the gaps between action. But it’s the voice acting that elevates everything, Enzo sounds grounded and soulful, and the supporting cast brings emotional range to even small roles. The voice acting carries the game well, with standout performances across the board, but the soundtrack itself doesn’t leave much of a mark. It sets the mood while you’re playing, then disappears from memory the moment you step away.
Mafia: The Old Country Value for Money - 9/10
At $49.99, The Old Country offers a high-quality narrative experience without overstaying its welcome. Its 10-12 hour runtime is impactful and every scene feels like it matters. There aren’t a ton of replay incentives, aside from soaking in more of the atmosphere, but the game doesn’t rely on bloated content or filler to pad things out. It earns your investment the old-fashioned way, by being good.
Mafia: The Old Country Review: Bellissimo
If you’re gonna tell a story about old-world mafia, there’s only one place it can truly begin: the dirt roads of Sicily, where loyalty is thicker than blood, and blood is just part of the soil. Mafia: The Old Country doesn’t just understand this, it breathes it. This isn’t the glitzy, neon-tinted America of Tommy Angelo’s rise or the big city grit of Vito Scaletta’s empire. No, this is the heartland. This is where it all began. And oh boy, do they make sure you feel it in your bones.
Set against the backdrop of early 20th-century Italy, back when mafiosi were family men first and criminals second (or so they'd like you to think), The Old Country takes the franchise back to its roots. Not just narratively, but thematically. It’s a quieter kind of chaos. No skyscrapers. No tommy guns blaring down modern highways. Just turf wars over vineyards, quiet vendettas whispered in dark churches, and power struggles fought over whose name gets remembered, and whose gets buried.
From the very first scene, it’s clear this isn’t just another gangster game. It’s a slow-burn opera of pride, pain, and tradition. The fields are golden, the air smells of sweat and wine, and violence creeps in like the sun setting behind the hills—inevitable, but never rushed.
And that brings us to Enzo. When we meet him, Enzo isn’t a man. He’s a miner. No future, no family, no freedom. He’s scraping through the days just to survive, his life measured in shifts, scraps, and scorn. But as with any good mafia story, fate intervenes—or maybe the world just finally pushes him too far.
The premise is familiar in the way all good stories are, a nobody with nothing to lose stumbles into something bigger than himself. But it’s the execution that makes it special. Mafia: The Old Country doesn’t open with a bang, it opens with a quiet, angry breath. And from that breath, Enzo exhales the rest of his life. He runs. Not toward power, but away from pain. And somehow, he finds himself on Don Torissi’s land.
That’s where things really begin.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. "The mafia takes him in? How convenient." But trust me, it’s not that clean. Torissi doesn’t shake Enzo’s hand and hand him a gun. He gives him a storage room. An actual, honest-to-god storage room used as a dumpster with a bed on the floor. And Enzo? He’s grateful. So damn grateful. Because when you’ve spent your whole life sharing a coal-black bunk with six coughing miners and no privacy, a room of your own—even one that smells like mold and old tomatoes—is a palace.
That moment? That was the first time I knew this game got it. The story doesn’t tell you to root for him, it shows you why you should. And that’s the power of The Old Country. It doesn’t just write its characters. It builds them—brick by brick, bruise by bruise. Everyone Enzo meets in those early days looks down on him. Some with amusement, some with outright disgust. But you chip away at that wall over time. Not with charm. Not with flash. With grit.
And grit is something Enzo has in spades. What I love most, though, is that Enzo never becomes a cliché. He doesn’t flip a switch and turn into a cold-blooded killer overnight. He changes, yes. He grows. He adapts. But at his core, he’s a man with a code—a man who wants something more, not just for himself but for those who finally gave him a chance. And that’s where the game’s moral compass becomes beautifully blurry.
The Torissi clan isn’t clean. No one in this game is. But they’re not monsters either. They extort, they kill, they protect, they provide. It’s messy. It’s human. They don’t talk about honor, they live by it. Even when it hurts. Even when it makes things worse. Especially then.
And yet, Mafia: The Old Country never glorifies the violence. It never winks at the player and says, "Wasn’t that cool?" Instead, it holds your gaze and asks, "Was it worth it?"
There’s love here too. Real love. Not just passion or revenge masquerading as romance. (Though there’s plenty of both.) No, I mean the kind of love that fuels empires and razes villages. The kind of love that makes you do stupid, brave, awful things. And no, I’m not saying another word about Isabella. You’ll thank me for it later.
All I’ll say is this: every chapter had me hooked. Every decision made me pause. Every fade-to-black made me want to keep going. I genuinely couldn’t stop myself from finishing the game in one sitting. It’s less like playing a game and more like being in a movie, the story had its claws in me and I was all too happy to bleed.
The Don’s Favorite Story
If the first few chapters were the setup—Enzo’s escape and the quiet dignity of being seen for the first time—then chapter five is where the story sharpens its knives. The Old Country doesn’t just want to tell you Enzo’s journey. It wants you to live it. Not through flashy cinematics or shallow mission markers, but through steady, earned progress. You’ll meet people. You’ll earn their respect—or their wrath. You’ll be tested in a dozen different ways, and every time you think you’ve "made it," the world will remind you you’re still on the outside of something bigger.
Enzo’s rise through the Torissi ranks is a slow burn in the best possible way. Each chapter, you’re given just enough of a foothold, a name remembered, a job well done, a nod from someone who used to look right through you. And with every rung you climb, the story tightens. Your responsibilities grow. So does the danger. And so do the cracks.
It’s not just Enzo who’s changing. The people around him are evolving, too. Allies get softer. Or harder. People you thought were solid start showing cracks. People you wrote off end up having your back when it counts. And every single one of them feels like a real person—flawed, layered, living by their own twisted code of survival. That’s what makes the writing here feel special.
Take Luca, for example—Don Torissi’s right-hand man. The kind of figure you expect to be cold, calculated, untouchable. And yet… his words? They have this strange poetry to them. When he talks about what the family does—the deals, the blood, the quiet power they hold—he doesn’t sound like a man defending crime. He sounds like a preacher delivering a sermon. You start to wonder: Does he actually believe they’re the good guys? Does he think they’re saving this town, this country, this culture—one brutal choice at a time?
And the scary part? You start to believe it too. It’s not that Luca is manipulative. It’s that he’s convincing. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t threaten. He explains. And the more you listen, the harder it gets to separate morality from necessity. That’s what this game does so well. It pulls you into conversations that don’t feel like exposition, they feel like tests. Of your character. Of your compass. Of how much you’re willing to forgive in the name of tradition, loyalty, and survival.
Usually, in games like this, you’re either the Good Guy or the Bad Guy. White hat or black hat. But here? Everyone’s hat is soaked in gray.
And then there’s Don Torissi. You’re not waiting for him to become a monster, you’re waiting for the moment he proves it. That’s the kind of man he is, or so you think. But instead of cruelty, what you get is a man who’s weathered, calculating, and quietly desperate to protect the only things that matter to him: his family, his blood, and the people who still count on his name to keep them safe. Every decision he makes feels like it carries weight, not because of what it takes from others, but because of what it costs him. The game never begs you to forgive him. It just hands you the facts and lets you sit with them. And the more you learn, the more it gnaws at you. Maybe he is a monster. Or maybe the monster was the world that shaped him.
The Old Country paces itself like a novel. Chapters are thoughtfully structured, with arcs that build, simmer, and pay off. The tension is always there, but it’s patient. It trusts you to care. And I did. A lot. I cared when Enzo stood his ground in front of someone who could’ve ended him with a snap, when he got his first proper bath, and when others started recognizing him as someone competent. These moments aren’t big, necessarily—they don’t always come with a dramatic music swell or a slow-mo camera angle—but they feel huge because you’ve earned them. You know what Enzo’s been through to get here. That emotional investment is what elevates the game from a good mafia story to a great one.
The way the story wraps around love is also something that caught me off guard. Yes, there’s violence. There’s betrayal. But when you peel back the layers, so much of what happens all comes down to love. Familial love. Romantic love. Love for power. Love for legacy. I’ve played a lot of story-driven games this year. Some had better visuals. Some had deeper mechanics. But few—very few—had a story that made me want to keep going the way The Old Country did. The final few hours especially? They hit hard. Not just because of what happens, but because of how much the game earns those moments. It builds its emotional peaks out of small, quiet victories and slow-burning failures. So when things finally erupt—and trust me, they do—you feel it.
In your gut. In your chest. In that part of you that knows stories like this don’t end well.
They end in choices. In sacrifices. In blood.
Business As Usual
Mafia: The Old Country might sell you on its story, but what you're actually doing most of the time? It's… pretty routine. The core loop is simple, setup, stakeout, shootout, rinse, repeat. Every chapter kicks off with some new mess. People need protecting, someone got kidnapped, someone got themselves taken by the police, and guess what? You’re the one who has to go check it out. That’s your life now. You show up, you sneak into a building or estate or wherever, you grab the guy (or the goods), and then—every single time—you shoot your way back out.
It’s very structured, almost ritualistic, like clockwork. Not in a bad way, but definitely in a predictable one. If you played Star Wars Outlaws, it’s got that same loop-y, TV-episode vibe. You always know where the commercial break would be.
Combat’s nothing special, but it gets the job done. A very serviceable third-person shooter—functional cover system, weighty-feeling guns, and just enough challenge that it never felt brain-dead. You’ve got your standard loadout options: knife, pistol, shotgun, rifle. The AI companion you usually roll with? Surprisingly decent at pulling their weight, drawing fire, and covering flanks. Enemies? Also decent. They’re not dumb, but they’re not gonna outsmart you. It’s not the kind of game where you stay for the gunplay, but it’s also not the kind where you dread it.
Outside of fights, there’s light environmental fluff. Some collectibles. Some outfits. Some vehicles—yes, including horses and cars. But the standout, weirdly enough, are the rosary beads. You find them where you least expect it and they act as passive upgrades. One might make your aim faster. Another might make your footsteps lighter. They’re a smart little nod to how real-life mobs are often surrounded by religion—not just thematically, but in practice. It’s not just flavor here, it’s function. A reminder that in this world, faith isn’t something you hang on the wall—it’s something you carry into battle.
There’s also a whole other layer baked into the moment-to-moment choices. And I don’t mean moral branching stuff. I mean split-second decision-making. Sometimes you’ve got to react fast—no time to think, no timer on screen, just tension. And if you hesitate? Something else decides for you. It’s not a QTE, not really, but it’s cinematic, and it matters. I can’t tell you what happens if you freeze—I wouldn’t dare spoil it—but let’s just say I wasn’t ready the first time it happened.
Under The Sicilian Sun
There’s a kind of magic to Mafia: The Old Country when you’re not in the middle of a job. When the guns go quiet, and the tension simmers down, Sicily opens up in all its warm, dusty splendor. Cobblestone alleys, sun-kissed vineyards, hilltop towns humming with quiet life—there’s real beauty in this world, and I felt it every time I let myself breathe between the chaos.
I’ll admit, I didn’t get to explore every corner. My first playthrough was a mainline sprint, I was too wrapped up in finishing the story. But the game does give you space. There are pockets of downtime where you're free to wander, uncover collectibles, or just walk around aimlessly while a classical guitar strums softly in the background. And yeah, I’ve already decided—this weekend, I’m diving back in just to lose myself in the world.
The ambient soundtrack adds a lot, really. It leans into classical, sometimes haunting tones when things get tense, but it's the quieter tracks—the ones that slip in during walks or scenic drives—that stuck with me. It’s like the game knows when to shut up and when to sing. But more than anything, the voice acting sold the world to me. Sharp deliveries and the weight behind every line.
That said, let’s talk about the weakest link, visuals. On the Xbox at least, things just didn’t hold up. There's a graininess to the whole presentation that I couldn’t shake off no matter how much I tweaked the setting. V-sync didn’t do much to save it either, with frames occasionally clipping or stuttering during cutscenes or fast camera turns. It’s frustrating, because the world is beautiful, but it feels like it’s being filtered through old hardware. If The Old Country had dropped five or so years ago, I’d have probably been impressed, but this is 2025. The bar’s higher now.
And yeah, there were bugs. Not a lot, but enough to take me out of the experience a few times. One that stuck with me was when I was tailing Cesare and for whatever reason the game didn’t register it, I auto-failed the mission because it said I moved too far away. Another time, I got tossed out of a moving car mid-handbrake, which would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t mid-chase. Still, I wouldn't call the game broken. Just… held back a bit.
Nothing Personal, Just Business
When the credits rolled on Mafia: The Old Country, I didn’t feel the usual whiplash of being yanked out of a massive game. There weren’t a thousand side quests left undone or some convoluted checklist shouting at me to 100% it. It was just… quiet. Clean. A story told, and told well.
And I think that’s what really worked for me here. The gameplay may not have been groundbreaking, it gets the job done, lets you shoot, sneak, and drive just fine—and the visuals, at least on the Xbox, weren’t anything to write home about. But the simplicity of it all, the stripped-down systems, meant that there was nothing standing in the way of the story. No towers to climb. No skill trees to overthink. Just you, the family, and the consequences.
I’ll leave it at this: Mafia: The Old Country may not raise the bar for action-adventure games in 2025. But it knows exactly what kind of game it wants to be and delivers that perfectly, and that might just be enough to turn it into a classic.
Is Mafia: The Old Country Worth It?
Welcome to the Family
At $49.99, Mafia: The Old Country doesn’t offer the longest runtime or the flashiest features. It isn’t sprawling, it isn’t particularly replayable, and you won’t be sinking dozens of hours into side content or customization menus. But what it does offer is clarity: a game that knows what it is, knows what it wants to say, and doesn’t waste your time saying it.
This is a lean, linear experience. You’re here for the story, the atmosphere, and the characters—and on those fronts, it absolutely delivers. The performances are strong, the writing is tighter than you'd expect, and its focus never wavers. For players tired of bloated maps and quest logs full of errands, The Old Country feels refreshingly confident in its restraint.
Yes, the visuals might not be the best, and yes, the core loop is serviceable at best. But if you're coming in expecting a grounded mob drama with a strong narrative backbone and a clear creative vision, you’ll likely walk away satisfied. It’s not a revolutionary game, but it is a memorable one, and sometimes, that’s worth more than another 80-hour sandbox.
| Digital Storefronts | ||||||||
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| Steam |
PlayStation |
Xbox |
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| Price | $49.99 | |||||||
Mafia: The Old Country FAQ
What languages are available in Mafia: The Old Country?
Mafia: The Old Country’s UI and subtitles are available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Czech, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Ukrainian.
Full voice acting is available in: English, French, German, Spanish (Spain), Czech, Russian, and Sicilian.
What Are Mafia: The Old Country’s System Requirements?
Refer to the image below for the game’s PC requirements.
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Mafia: The Old Country Voice Acting Will Use Authentic Sicilian Rather Than Modern Italian |
Mafia: The Old Country Product Information
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| Title | Mafia: The Old Country |
|---|---|
| Release Date | August 8, 2025 |
| Developer | Hangar 13 |
| Publisher | 2K |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Action-Adventure |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | M |
| Official Website | Mafia: The Old Country Website |
