Mafia: The Old Country

Mafia: The Old Country is a third-person action game with a heavy cinematic streak. Enzo's work for the Family mixes exploration, driving, stealth and combat, and the series' trademark storytelling sets the pace.

Combat changes with distance. Up close, the stiletto blade is a weapon in its own right: you can ambush enemies for silent takedowns or square up in tense knife duels that reward reading your opponent. At range you switch to period handguns, rifles and shotguns, with the sawn-off lupara as the signature tool for clearing a room. Picking when to sneak and when to start shooting is the main tactical choice in most fights.

Getting around is part of the fantasy. You gallop on horseback across fields and cobbled streets or bounce down dirt roads in turn-of-the-century cars, whether you are chasing a target or fleeing after a hit. Locations swing from underground crypts and crumbling ruins to vineyards and an ornate opera house, so the backdrop keeps changing.

Adjustable difficulty, full controller support, subtitle and colour options and HDR output round out the PC build. It is strictly single-player, and Steam tracks 62 achievements for completionists.

Enzo Favara has known nothing but hardship. After a brutal childhood of forced labour, he sees one way out: joining the Torrisi crime family and becoming a man of honour. The oath he swears brings power and temptation, and it comes with a price the game keeps returning to: family takes sacrifice.

Sicily at the turn of the century is beautiful and lethal in equal measure. Rival families wage turf wars out of public view, trust is rare and loyalty is something people kill for. Enzo works his way up through this gangland, meeting allies he cannot fully rely on and enemies who will not forget a slight.

It is a classic crime story told with period detail, told like a mob film, and you live through every compromise Enzo makes on his way into the underworld.

Mafia: The Old Country is out now on Windows PC through Steam at US$49.99. Steam prices it at RM178 in Malaysia, S$69.99 in Singapore, ₱2,080 in the Philippines, ฿1,390 in Thailand, Rp 570,000 in Indonesia and 830.000₫ in Vietnam. There are 15 languages, including Japanese, Korean, Polish, Czech and both Chinese scripts, but no Thai, Indonesian or Vietnamese. Minimum spec is an RTX 2070 or RX 5700 XT with 16 GB of RAM and 55 GB on an SSD for 1080p medium settings. Full controller support and HDR are included, and it carries a mature content rating.