While the Mafia series has always been more about telling a linear story than letting players explore fully-realised open worlds (with the possible exception of Mafia 3) Mafia: The Old Country was even more linear than most. Its story ushered players through its slice of Sicilian countryside in a rather impatient manner, and while its Explore mode technically offered freedom to roam, roaming was all you could do.
But with the release of the Free Ride update, that’s all changed. Well, slightly changed. Free Ride replaces Explore mode completely, offering a similarly open-ended experience while fleshing it out with actual stuff to do. Whether or not this stuff is worth doing is another question, but at the very least it’s an improvement over nothing.
Primarily, Free Ride introduces two new activity types—the old videogame staples of racing and combat. Races come in both car and horse varieties, though vehicles get substantially more love than their equine counterparts. Petrolheads can participate in three lap-based circuit races, three linear road sprints, and six time trials. Horses just get three circuit races, though given how little I enjoyed wrangling gee-gees in The Old Country’s story mode, that’s probably enough.
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In short, Free Ride upgrades Explore from an empty open world to a very, very basic open world. Which is still better, and something Hangar 13 didn’t need to do. But I don’t think it’s going to convince me to return to Sicily any time soon.
Elsewhere, the update folds in several other features alongside Free Ride such as a photo mode, a black & white Cinema Siciliano mode with deliberately derezzed audio and Sicilian language set by default, plus a Classic difficulty setting apparently inspired by the original Mafia. Most interesting to me, though, is the introduction of first-person driving.
Apparently, this is the first time the series has allowed players to see through the driver’s eyes while in cars, and I will confess to being curious as to what throwing its vintage racers and ostentatious sedans around in first-person might be like. Not enough to play the whole game again, but a quick trundle about in Free Ride? I might be up for that.
The Free Ride update is available now. As Joshua Wolens mentioned in his Mafia: The Old Country review, the main problem with the prequel is not its lack of a true open world, but that it is mechanically derivative and has a deeply predictable story. “If there’s a surprise in how these arcs play out, it’s only that there are no surprises,” he wrote back in August. “Things really do go how you immediately anticipate them going right from the very start.
None of this has stopped The Old Country from being a roaring success, however, at least in the eyes of Take Two boss Strauss Zelnick. Speaking earlier this month, Zelnick said The Old Country’s cut down structure and cheaper launch price had produced the “perfect result” for the publisher, so we can likely expect similar projects from Hangar 13 in the future.
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