{"id":349544,"date":"2025-08-16T16:17:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T16:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/349544\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T16:17:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T16:17:10","slug":"what-are-you-playing-this-weekend-16th-august","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/349544\/","title":{"rendered":"What Are You Playing This Weekend? (16th August)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I finished up the platinum trophy for Mafia: The Old Country<\/strong> this week. I found it to be the epitome of a 7\/10 game which is a compliment. I honestly would rate it higher if not for a couple of nagging issues that prevent it from excelling.<\/p>\n

The story and characters are very well written and acted. I managed to get invested in their arc(s) and care about the main protagonist and his fate. It may have been a predictable tale, but that didn\u2019t stop it from being effective. My complaint, however, lies with its ending. It wasn\u2019t bad\u2014it was rushed. There should have been a few more chapters sprinkled in to flesh out the narrative. There are character perspectives that go from adoring someone in the Mafioso family to complete defilement in the span of one chapter. It didn\u2019t make sense. Thematically, I understand, but how we got to that destination felt diluted.<\/p>\n

On the other side of things, I found the gameplay solid and enjoyable. The driving felt more intuitive than Mafia 1, and the combat and stealth mechanics were great, albeit uninspired. It felt like an Uncharted game from the early PS3-era, with its cover based shooting, stealth elements, and set pieces.<\/p>\n

The only real annoyance I have with the game – and this dates back to Mafia 1 – is the collectibles. My goodness, talk about atrocious. The developers really needs to come up with a better system for how you acquire these items, particularly when it\u2019s an limited open world that encourages you to stay on the main course by having a countdown of 15 seconds to return to the main objective if you stray off the beaten path. Guess where at least a partial amount of those collectibles are; yep, you guessed it.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, once you beat the game there is an option for chapter replay and \u201cexplore\u201d mode, meaning you have access to the entire world map. This sounds great in theory, but it still makes hunting for collectibles tiresome. They won\u2019t appear on the map unless you are physically next to it. This wouldn\u2019t be much of an issue if there was an incentive to get out of your vehicle or dismount from your horse, but there isn\u2019t. Speaking of the map, you can\u2019t set any markers, so you are constantly opening and closing your map to see how close you are to your destination.<\/p>\n

What doesn\u2019t appear on the map regardless if you are near is the infamous foxes that you can obtain. There are 50 of them total, and unlike other collectibles such as Newspapers, Saint cards, and Photographs, they don\u2019t have a specific name registered to them. Moreover, some of these collectibles are exclusively tied to main missions, and since there is no tracker for what you have or haven\u2019t collected in the story, good luck with the hunt.<\/p>\n

Overall, I think the game is good to borderline great. If you\u2019re a fan of a tight narrative with compelling characters and serviceable gameplay you should definitely try this game out. There are a few stumbles along the way with its pacing, but if you\u2019re looking for something to beat over a weekend then you can\u2019t go wrong with this game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I finished up the platinum trophy for Mafia: The Old Country this week. I found it to be…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[126,270,125,516,53,16,15,21569],"class_list":{"0":"post-349544","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-features","9":"tag-nintendo-switch-2","10":"tag-polls","11":"tag-talking-point","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-what-are-you-playing"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115039348023267368","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}