Mafia: The Old Country Review: Gorgeous Sicily, Dated Story & Old-School Design

Mafia: The Old Country paints a breathtaking portrait of early 1900s Sicily, but leans so heavily on throwback design and a predictable mob tale that its beauty often feels trapped in amber. If you crave a compact, linear crime drama with handsome period detail and no modern fluff, this is a mood piece worth a look. If you want a more flexible open world and story beats that surprise, the romance of the setting won’t fully mask the creaks in its old-school bones.

The opening hours set the tone: a machine-age carriage rattling through dusty roads, volcano smoke on the horizon, and a new protagonist who feels both haunted and hardened by the island’s unforgiving order. From the first mission, The Old Country makes a clear choice to roll back the clock on series design. There’s no online sprawl, no economy of endless icons, no live-service scaffolding. It is single-player, story-first, and proud of it. That commitment gives the game coherence and focus, but it also limits how much of its world you can actually inhabit, especially if you’re used to getting lost in a map for hours between main missions.

The setting is the star, and it is radiant. Sicilian towns tumble down hillsides into honeyed fields. Wind-scoured ridgelines give way to citrus groves and stone bridges. The game’s art direction sells a countryside caught between tradition and the modern world: goat herders share space with sputtering motorcars; gramophones warble out folk songs as a new class of dons flex their money and influence. Lighting and sound design do an admirable job to ground you in place, from cicadas in the heat to bells echoing from hilltop chapels. You can practically feel the grit in the air.

That sense of place propels a story that is intentionally archetypal. The beats are familiar: an indebted young man clawing his way up through another family’s ranks, class divides simmering, forbidden love complicating loyalties. The performances, accent work, and framing give the cast a strong presence, but the plot rarely deviates from the well-trodden path. It’s the kind of narrative that feels engineered to evoke classic cinema rather than to challenge it. When the dramatic turns hit, you’ll likely see them coming a mile away, and the game tends to accelerate between milestones instead of dwelling in the quiet, human moments that could have deepened everything.

Mission design is similarly conservative. Expect a rotation of cover shootouts, knife-duel boss encounters, stealth infiltrations, and some hair-raising drives along serpentine roads. The combat is tight enough and weighty, with a welcome emphasis on positioning and limited resources. However, objectives can feel like they were pulled from a 2006 playbook: tail this car, sneak past these guards, hold out against waves, escape a hot zone. A few set pieces stand out, especially where the environment intrudes on the action—dust storms sweeping across farm fields, rain slicking cobbles at a midnight rendezvous—but the structure rarely flexes beyond safe, linear tracks.

One of the more puzzling choices is how the game handles exploration. The open world is a looker, yet free-roaming is tucked into a separate mode. It does keep the main campaign lean and cinematic, keeping you laser-focused on the next beat. But it also means the simple joy of detouring down an unmarked lane or poking into a vineyard after a tense shootout gets lost in the menu shuffle. While interiors and side activities are limited by design, it feels like a missed opportunity not to let the setting breathe more naturally during the story. When you do carve out time to wander, you’ll find collectible notes, period clippings, and excuses to take scenic drives that underline how good the art team has it.

There are sparks of thematic ambition. The Old Country nods at the machinery of power that produces both criminals and kings: how laborers are exploited and discarded, how the newly wealthy enforce genteel cruelty from gilded verandas, and how family loyalty blurs into obligation and debt. Whenever the game slows down enough to let those tensions surface—an awkward dinner, a tense church step conversation, a roadside tale spun by a local storyteller—it hints at a richer tapestry beneath the genre blueprint. Those scenes make you wish for a few more quiet chapters where the island itself, not the next gunfight, holds center stage.

Performance-wise, the ride isn’t spotless. Transitions between cinematics and gameplay can stumble, with stutters and occasional hitches that undercut dramatic handoffs. It’s not frequent enough to break the experience, but you’ll notice it when the frame drops right as you take the wheel or slip into a stealth section. In exploration mode, I ran into a visual glitch or two that briefly stretched textures where they didn’t belong before snapping back. Nothing catastrophic, but the polish doesn’t always match the strength of the art direction.

Despite the dated elements, the game benefits from a strong sense of identity. The Euro-mob tone, the restrained runtime, the refusal to dump chores on your map—all of it contributes to a compact package that knows what it wants to be. In a climate of bloated checklists, there’s value in that. If you remember the way older crime games kept you on rails but still left you with indelible vibes, you’ll likely feel at home here. The flipside is that anyone hoping for a modern evolution of Mafia’s formula will find fewer innovations than they’d expect from a 2025 release.

Vehicle handling deserves a shout, too. Early autos and carriages feel rickety in a satisfying way, forcing deliberate braking and making every downhill hairpin a small victory. The sense of speed is modest, but the sense of danger is high; the road is your adversary as much as rival families. Gunplay, while conservative, rewards patience and steady aim over run-and-gun chaos, and melee encounters have a grim, crunchy finality that suits the setting.

So, who is The Old Country for? If you want a short, focused mob drama framed by some of the most evocative countryside in the genre, this delivers. If you measure your open worlds by density of distractions or expect narrative swerves and systemic freedom, you’ll likely bounce off the constraints. The Old Country is not here to chase trends—it’s here to resurrect a feeling.

Verdict: A gorgeous throwback that can’t outrun its own nostalgia. The island is unforgettable; the story and structure are safe to a fault. Come for the atmosphere and craftsmanship, stay for the vibe, and accept that you’re trading modern flexibility for a deliberate, old-school ride.