Thor on 12/10/2020 at 17:00
I actually bought this game (been a good while since I last bought any) and even finished it (been an even gooder while) on classic mode as that sounded like the one I'm looking for. Was pretty solid for the most part and the graphics were stunning for me who rarely plays modern games despite sporting a GTX 1080, especially those nighttime rainy street light reflections - those reflections, man. A lot of things I prefer in the original, some I prefer in this one, some things annoy me in both. Overall a solid game, though more rushable and easy than the original. Dividing the epic shootouts in the Sergio Morello level and the final level definitely meant it was easier and I could afford being less careful, though I still died plenty so I'm not particularly complaining given that I don't have as much time on my hands as I did in my youth. The NPCs are about as dumb as they come too, which meant that I hardly had problems shaking the cops, and I found myself in unrealistic situations way too easily. I guess I must be rare, but I liked the original Mafia driving. GTA's always felt arcadey, while Mafia's - more grounded. This newest one feels overall ok enough, albeit a bit "spongy" if that's an adjective - like there's little weight to them. That is also furthered by the fact that I've sent cars literally flying after crashing into them, plus not really taking adequate damage myself. I liked that a headshot is still a headshot and disliked that anywhere else in the body is still a sponge of a hit, now they can even shoot me while I shoot them in non-head areas. That's a bit weird that they'd recover from a bullet in a split second and hit me dead-on.
It was certainly interesting to see the alternative take on the characters - none of the characters give off the same feel as their original counterpart. Off the top of my head, only Ralphie and Morello both still felt pretty similar to their originals with a
maybe for Salieri & Sam. Tommy and Paulie were the most differentiated out of them all. The original Tommy didn't feel Italian at all while here it was practically his entire identity (+ his immense talent for winning a race against all odds and single-handedly winning every single shootout - you'd almost think he has infinite save/reload ability or godmode or something), while Paulie was more lively and business-oriented and less whiny sounding, and they both felt overall more wholesome in the original. Well, this version is probably more realistic, though I found the original executions of these two more likable. That goes for nearly all the characters now that I think about it. Except for Sergio Morello, he was pretty dope this time around.
The race was still fun but more forgiving in the car handling (shit was slippery but wasn't so easy to screw up the entire race because you turns 160° when you needed 90°) and less forgiving in what mistakes you can make and it felt like some of the other drivers had genuinely faster cars, which means that if I didn't get to first place within the first half of the first lap, I didn't stand a chance. The first time I succeeded in doing that I won the race, but I had to sweat as the next 3 cars followed close behind me with about 2m distance from each other.
I liked the Morello ending, though the original's light-hearted manner about it was quite nice too (and I prefer the original's ending where they toss him off a bride - perfectly executed trialogue there).
I know I'm boomer-sounding throughout all this as I constantly compare with the original, but while I'm at it, though I understand why, I did miss the ritual of getting a new car every and visiting Vincenzo for a gun for each mission, and then Lucas Bartone for an extra car (here he played a role of any kind in only 1 mission) and I don't care for the cover based shooting style not the "character moves to left as I try to shoot someone" gimmick, which was actually buggy and I could exploit it. I did like the somewhat functional stealth mechanics
Overall feels: A bit similar to Mafia 2, though I like it better than Mafia 2. They're both more gritty and serious and it's harder to drive over pedestrians, goddamnit. :mad: It's main pluses for me are that it looks really nice, has smooth animations, has an alternative take on missions & their flow, the story and the characters, though I wouldn't necessarily call it better. I missed Tommy's signature Colt 1911. Even if it was there and I didn't recognize it visually (there were definitely similar looking models), the naming was completely generic for all of the guns so I wouldn't know.
Quote Posted by henke
Look away if you don't want spoilers because here's the true ending of the game that you only get if you complete the Free Ride missions!
[video=youtube;ihRFdA5BmAg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihRFdA5BmAg[/video]
Hey, I didn't realize they still kept the Freeride Extreme thing! I need to pay more attention to the Free Ride map, it seems. I remember doing all of them back in the day, that elevated the game to a new level.
P.S. A shame there's no feature to play it nice and ride a tram/train. Unless it's an unlockable or something. There's a lot of artificial feature cutting. I'm also not a fan of the "realistic walking simulator" bits, where I can only walk mega-slow through the bar and some other places.
henke on 13/10/2020 at 06:26
No tram riding so far, but since they patched in taxi-driving and races I'm guessing they might add it in still. You can fast travel back to Salieri's from any bus stop tho. There's a surprising amount of things to find and do in Free Ride, and I love that it's not in-your-face but kinda hidden away. Takes me back to GTAIII and playing the post-campaign game for ages trying to mop up secrets. I've already done all the missions and found all the secret cars tho. Only found 2/50 fox statues, but I'm not gonna bother with that.
Here's another good mission:
[video=youtube;uRVtLqJzE7U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVtLqJzE7U[/video]
Hell, Mafia: DE has more fun and variety in its Free Ride missions than Mafia 3 had in its main campaign!
henke on 14/10/2020 at 10:11
Hey speaking of the mafia and italians and gabagool and shit let me shoehorn a dunkey video into this thread
[video=youtube;XZp6zxh2yjE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZp6zxh2yjE&list=PLMBTl5yXyrGSa67JeYb6ctt1gCvL9BdEX[/video]
Thor on 16/10/2020 at 01:28
This challenge in the countryside really drove me up the wall. Countless times I died unfairly because of some random invisible deadly rock in the country roads. Twice I got very close to the goal, and on the penultimate attempt, I parked 1 meter from the designated parking space. Finally, I succeeded, and the recorder was on so I may as well share it.
[video=youtube;b3fuR-1OJ8I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3fuR-1OJ8I[/video]
henke on 16/10/2020 at 05:40
Yeah that one's pretty tough, I had to redo it a few times. But the hardest one by far is the UFO one. That thing moves so fast you really can't keep up unless you know exactly where it's going to go next. So the whole thing becomes a process of trial and error, learning the checkpoints one by one. What helped for me was using the C-class racecar, and a bolt rifle so I can shoot it from further away. Still took 20 or so attempts before I managed it.
Tomi on 16/10/2020 at 21:38
Just finished Mafia: DE yesterday! I'm very pleased to say that it's an excellent game, a successful remake of an already fantastic game. The remake is surprisingly faithful to the original, sometimes even too faithful, but I don't mind most of the changes that they've made. I wish they had kept at least some of the music from the original Mafia, that would have given me some nice nostalgic vibes. :D The game looks amazing even on low settings (my poor computer can't handle anything better) and I love all the little details.
Stealth seems to be an option in some missions now, but I'm not sure if that's just a good thing. The airport mission, for example, was one big glorious shootout in the original game, but in the remake I completed the mission without firing a single bullet. That was nowhere as fun, but I guess I can only blame myself for being boring. :p Next time I'll go in with my guns blazing.
I've now been playing around in Free Mode too. At first I couldn't figure out how to actually play the missions (I avoid going inside Salieri's Bar unless necessary, because of the annoyingly slow walking), and when I did, I didn't realise that I should have grabbed some guns with me as well. The missions seem really challenging! But I like it that way, even though some of them can be quite frustrating too, but you gotta know when to stop banging your head against the wall and play some other game.
Thor on 16/10/2020 at 23:23
Yeah, strangely I think I like the Free Ride + missions better than the actual game. :joke: I did suspect I could try and sneak through the airport, but I didn't try too hard and consequently didn't succeed at that, just went for a nice shootout.
From the original musical score, I only heard a reprisal of the Works Quarter theme and a bit of the main theme. Well, the opening cinematic was brilliantly faithful to the original, probably could've made one tear up at that in a more sentimental mood! But yeah, overall the musical score reminds me more of Mafia 2's music, but it's still nice music, though I'm not entirely sure it fits the period (not that I know the music of that period super well).
Quote Posted by henke
Yeah that one's pretty tough, I had to redo it a few times. But the hardest one by far is the UFO one. That thing moves so fast you really can't keep up unless you know
exactly where it's going to go next. So the whole thing becomes a process of trial and error, learning the checkpoints one by one. What helped for me was using
the C-class racecar, and a bolt rifle so I can shoot it from further away. Still took 20 or so attempts before I managed it.
I did this one today, I found it overall less frustrating than the electric racecar challenge, though it still took many enough tries. Out of the
5 stops, I found the
2nd and
3rd to be unreasonably untraceable, but after 1 or 2 fails I got the location nailed down so it wasn't too annoying (unless you'd want to beat this on your first attempt - then it's unreasonable). The
shootout at the end of it had me failing about 5 times as well. But in the end, I was solid with a revolver and a Thompson & one of those fast cars that look like a cabriolet or something (through experimentation I found that at some point a faster car won't necessarily be helpful, but I did need a decently fast car to accelerate me up to Beech (Oak, actually :rolleyes:) Hill the straight way.
Shot half of the guys at the end from my car with the revolver just because the car's aim is surpririsngly good).So far it looks to me like there's about
11 or so freeride missions in total, all in
Salieri Bar, so I might soon be done with them all, ahhh. Though there is that one in
"South of Holbrook or Southern Holbrook" which I fail to find after a total of over 1 hour of searching for the booth. Not sure what's up with that.
Oh, another strange thing is that I saw the UFO car at the end of the challenge, looked nice, like in the original, but I can't seem to find it in my garage....
Thor on 17/10/2020 at 22:00
That was an interesting take on the mission, and an interesting driving angle too! I notice that you literally had less than a second to spare, now that's a close call, hehe. It looks like you did the mission in much fewer tries than I did.
I did it kind of completely differently, albeit not sure if particularly correctly, as the last 10-20 seconds of the challenge I messed up way too many times, because of a circumstantial element I couldn't control - a car always getting in my way right before the diner, and always for the last car too :mad:. And another time much earlier I got them all drowned, but the timer ran out about a second before it registered this fact. At least I documented the blood-stained successful ride.
[video=youtube;XQSXArU1ehU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQSXArU1ehU[/video]
Immediately after I finally found the biking mission and did that with relative ease, which concludes my run of the free ride mission set as far as I'm aware (I counted
11). Was a nice journey.
Edit: Ahh,
nope! I thought 11 was an odd number to finish on and also remembered about lacking that fox costume!
henke on 18/10/2020 at 05:41
Ah! Well I wish I'd found either of those spots as they look far faster than the one I went with. :p
Also pretty sure it's a German shepherd, not a fox.
Thor on 18/10/2020 at 20:31
Quote Posted by henke
Also
pretty sure it's a German shepherd, not a fox.Ah yeah, I read it in my head as a fox because of that fox collectible. Anyway, got all of the cars now too. Very fun, awesome cars, I liked the
postcard style car hunt, no violence or racing maybe even more than the other challenges or at least as a nice change of tone. Shame there's nothing to do now, but it's been a great ride and still worth booting it up now and again just to soak in that mood on the weather of choice & drive an appropriate car.
I almost feel like making a top x cars list but off that's quite a difficult task and largely up to the mood and feel. But I do like the entire Lassiter brand (Sergio Morello's car too, though I think they nerfed its speed in this game) and the similar Trautenberg. I also like Manta, Disorder (
the 'last' car you find in North County), Eckhardt Fletcher (Morello's car), and I have a real liking for the Houston Coupe. Come to think of it, I like most cars in the game. :p