Between Swedish developer Digital Illusions' upcoming World War II shooter Battlefield 1942 and Czech Republic-based Illusion Softworks' newly available Mafia, September's turning out to be a banner month for great driving-shooting hybrids from European companies with the word "illusion" in their name. Arriving without much prerelease hype, Mafia is a highly engaging combination of the driving and living-city elements of Grand Theft Auto III and the story-driven third-person shooting action of Max Payne. What's more, it isn't plagued by the litany of problems usually associated with ambitious games from small development houses. Mafia looks and sounds great, it's exciting, it's suitably bug-free, and, at a time when eight hours is becoming the standard length for single-player shooters, it's long. Quite simply, Mafia is one of the best games of the year.
As implied by the first paragraph of this review, comparisons between Mafia and the famous Grand Theft Auto III are inevitable. Both games take place in detailed and sprawling clockwork cities, both games involve stealing cars and avoiding the police, and both games have plots in which you navigate a criminal underworld. The comparison breaks down when the details and structure of the games' gameplay are considered, however. In much the same way that Grand Theft Auto III includes an almost-complete version of Crazy Taxi as a minigame, Mafia can be considered a generally linear third-person shooter that features a miniature version of Grand Theft Auto III. Mafia's living city, a 1930s metropolis called Lost Heaven, is almost as fully realized as Grand
MINIMUM
Windows 98/2000/ME/XP
Pentium III or AMD Athlon 800MHz Processor
256MB RAM
2GB Hard Disk Space
Nvidia TNT2, GeForce 1, 2 or 3, ATI Radeon 7000, 7200, 7500 or 8500, or Matrox G450 Video Card
DirectX Compatible Sound Card
DirectX 9
MAXIMUM
Windows 7/Vista (32 or 64 bit)
Intel i7 Quad Core 2.8Ghz or AMD equivalent
3GB System RAM (High)
30 GB Hard dDisk Space
nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX / ATI Radeon HD4850 Video Card
Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live
DirectX 9.0 - DirectX 11
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