Mafia 3

Release date: 7 October

22 mins of Gameplay  

Platforms: Windows, MacOS, PS4 and Xbox One.

Violence has always been an integral part of The Mafia series, but based on the new gameplay footage shown behind closed doors at E3, the third entry in the series takes it to a new, perhaps unnecessary, level.

At the presentation we were shown a huge amount of Mafia 3 content. First was a map of the world – New Bordeaux – which is based on New Orleans. The game is set in 1968, a big year in the US in terms of civil rights and race relations.

There are a number of districts to explore, including the Bayou, a “mysterious” forested area ripe for exploration; Frisco Fields, a wealthy part complete with mansions and parks; and the French Ward, the neon-filled party district where every vice you can think of – and a few more besides – can be found.

The city looks fantastic, with atmospheric lighting, dirty streets and colourful neon lights adding to a feeling of the place being alive. The graphics look great.

From this point onwards, my preview contains minor plot spoilers.

The story of the game follows Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam veteran who’s come back from war and has joined the Black Mafia. Betrayed by the Mob, who all but wiped out the Black Mafia, Clay is now on a path of uncompromising revenge and is looking to take the city of New Bordeaux into his own hands, one district at a time.

Joining him for the ride are three cronies who all have a beef with the Mob: Cassandra, Burke and Scaletta. These characters are central to the game’s management layer, in which you take hold of city districts and assign management of them to one of the three. Your choice affects your abilities and the bonuses you receive in those districts, so your decision does have some consequences.

In the gameplay we were shown, the player had been ignoring Burke, failing to assign him much territory of late. When Clay doesn’t offer Burke his latest capture district, we see him angrily storm out, threatening to kill our (anti) hero.

If one of your cronies gets cheesed off to that level, you’ll be handed a mission in which you have to wipe them out. As a result, not all players will experience the same missions; it will depend entirely on the decisions they take at management level.

The conversations experienced at the territory discussion meeting appear rather forced. The characters' responses are based on the current situation, and as a result are fairly generic. They don’t add anything to the overall experience, and in fact make the three cronies appear like they’re not actually central characters at all.

Away from the management side of things, we were also shown a big chunk of mission gameplay. There will be central story missions, of course, but there are also optional quests that you complete, whereby you gradually bring down district leaders by depleting their stash of cash. These take the form of robberies, shooting up orgies, interrogating people and you generally being an all round nuisance.

You get to choose which of these side missions you fancy, and before each one you're presented with the option of calling in your friendly local arms dealer to pick your loadout. If you find that things are going south, you can call in reinforcements, who appear almost instantly and unleash Tommy gun hell on everyone who stands in their way.

The combat is fairly standard over-the-shoulder fare, but there are a couple of points of interest. The first is a witness counter, which shows you how many people will see the crime you’re about the commit. The second is Clay’s magical – and so far unexplained – ability to see through walls to highlight enemies; was this a skill upgrade through some sort of RPG-style tree, or will this be available from the start? We’ll have to wait and see.

We were also shown an entire story mission. Clay is hell-bent on killing a local rich businessman, and finds himself the perfect opportunity when said mogul organises a lavish party on a paddle steamer. You can see where this is going.

It’s here where Clay’s motivations become rather more troublesome. We were shown Clay blowing up a gantry over the boat, causing the vessel to collapse and half-sink. In what are actually quite disturbing scenes, many party-goers are set alight and others fall into the river and are snapped up by alligators. That’s a lot of innocent civilian murder just to kill one man, and I think I’d struggle to play through this mission without feeling a little disenfranchised with Clay’s behaviour.

We’re not given an explanation of who exactly the party-goers are; so many of them could be what we now consider to be on the wrong side of history, but it’s still hard to put yourself in Clay’s shoes at that moment.

From there, you find the businessman, kill him and hang him from a statue in the middle of the city, which is another fairly extreme action.

I'm no hypocrite; I'm more than aware that I revelled in going on destructive sprees with Trevor in GTA V. But there I had a choice, and GTA's light-heartedness made it feel okay. Here, it's serious, and you have no choice but to murder as many people on that steamboat as possible. It just doesn't sit right with me.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I’ll take into account that we don’t yet know Clay’s full story – after all, there have been plenty of excellent mafia films where the antihero performs unsavoury acts. The dude’s had an extremely tough life and has absolutely nobody to care for, so for that character this behaviour probably makes sense.

The problem is, playing such an antihero might prove a turn-off for many. I’ll reserve full judgement for when the game is actually released.