Mafia: The Old Country Review: A Confident Return to the Roots in Sicily

A Return to the Birthplace

🔫 This review is part of the The Mafia Trilogy – play all three eras of organized crime in order.

There is a moment early in Mafia: The Old Country when you simply stand on a hillside above a Sicilian village, the morning haze burning off the terraced fields below, church bells carrying across the valley. No icons. No objective marker pulling you somewhere. Just a place, rendered with the kind of care that tells you the people who made this game actually love it.

After years of the series chasing the open-world trend and losing its soul in the process, that hillside is a statement of intent.

This is the Mafia I fell for in the first place.

Hangar 13’s 2025 prequel takes the series all the way back to early-1900s Sicily — the literal birthplace of the Mafia — and, just as importantly, back to the structure that made the original a classic. No bloated map. No busywork. No padding. Just a tight, linear, story-first crime epic about a young man pulled into a world he can never leave.

It is the best Mafia in years, and it is not particularly close.

---

Sicily, 1900s: The Setting Is the Star

The Mafia series has always lived and died on its settings, and The Old Country has the best one the franchise has ever produced.

Early-1900s Sicily is a world of contrasts. Sun-bleached stone villages cling to hillsides. Lemon and olive groves stretch toward the coast. Dusty roads wind between estates where wealth and poverty sit uncomfortably close together. And beneath the postcard beauty runs a system of fear, debt, and quiet violence that controls everything.

What makes it work is restraint. This is not a sprawling sandbox stuffed with collectibles. It is a handcrafted series of locations, each built to serve a specific story beat. You move through them, you absorb them, and then you move on. Nothing overstays its welcome.

The result is a place that feels lived-in rather than designed. The sulfur mines, the grand villas, the cramped village streets — each one carries its own mood, and each one earns its place in the story.

---

A Brutal Coming-of-Age Story

At the center of it all is a young man bound to a crime family — and his journey from desperate outsider to made man is the spine of the whole game.

Without spoiling specifics, the story is a coming-of-age tale soaked in blood. It is about loyalty offered to people who have not earned it, about debts that can never truly be repaid, and about the slow realization that the family you are bound to will demand everything you have.

It is brutal. People you grow to care about pay terrible prices. The violence, when it comes, lands with weight rather than spectacle.

But it is also the most focused, best-told story the series has managed since the 1930s original. There is no subplot bloat, no detour padding the runtime. Every chapter advances the character and tightens the noose. By the back half, the inevitability of where this is heading becomes genuinely difficult to watch — in the best possible way.

This is storytelling with the confidence to be small, specific, and devastating.

---

Ad

Mafia: The Old Country (PS5) (opens in a new tab)

The 2025 prequel set in early-1900s Sicily. Focused, linear, and the freshest high point of the entire series.

---

Linear by Design — and Better for It

Let me be blunt about the thing that matters most here: The Old Country is linear, and that is its greatest strength.

Mafia III tried to be a sprawling open-world game and drowned its excellent story in repetitive map-clearing busywork. The Old Country looks at that lesson and walks the other way entirely. Missions are handcrafted set pieces. You go where the story takes you. You do what the chapter demands. Then the next chapter begins.

This is exactly the design philosophy that made the original Mafia great, and it pays off everywhere. Pacing is controlled instead of diluted. Every location feels purposeful. The action sequences are choreographed rather than emergent, which means they actually build to something.

In an era where every big-budget game seems contractually obligated to be a 60-hour open world stuffed with towers to climb, a confident 12-to-15-hour linear crime epic feels almost radical. It respects your time. It tells one story and tells it well. For dads who get maybe an hour a night after bedtime, that focus is a feature, not a compromise.

---

How It Plays

Moment to moment, The Old Country is a competent, satisfying third-person action game built around cover shooting, melee, and period-appropriate gunplay. There are no laser sights and red-dot optics here — you are working with the weapons of the era, and the slower, weightier feel suits the setting.

The standout addition is a knife-based dueling system that turns key confrontations into tense, deliberate exchanges rather than button-mash brawls. It is a smart way to make violence feel personal in a story that is fundamentally about personal betrayal.

Driving — a series staple — returns with the temperamental early automobiles of the period, and they handle exactly as gloriously janky as you would hope. There is real character in coaxing one of these machines up a Sicilian mountain road.

Is it the deepest combat system in the genre? No. But it does not need to be. The mechanics exist to serve the story, and at that job they perform well.

---

---

The Honest Shortcomings

I am giving The Old Country a 9, not a 10, and I want to be straight about why. This is a brutally honest blog, and a 10 means perfect for what it set out to do. This game is excellent, but it is not quite that.

First, it is on the shorter side. Twelve to fifteen hours is a tight, focused runtime, and I genuinely prefer that to padding — but some players will finish it and wish there were more. There is so much craft on display that you are left wanting another act, which is a good problem to have but a real one. The price-to-length math will matter to some.

Second, a couple of combat encounters feel rote. For a game this carefully authored, there are one or two stretches where the action defaults to generic cover-shoot-the-room beats that any third-person shooter could have produced. They are not bad, but they break the spell briefly in a game that is otherwise so deliberate. A handful of fewer, sharper encounters would have served the story better than the occasional filler firefight.

Neither flaw is close to a dealbreaker. But they are the difference between a great game and a perfect one, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

---

Ad

PlayStation 5 Console (opens in a new tab)

The cleanest way to run The Old Country with stable performance, fast loading, and the lighting detail Sicily deserves.

---

The Best Mafia in Years

Step back from the details and the picture is clear: Mafia: The Old Country is the modern high point of the entire franchise.

It is the freshest, most confident the series has felt since the original. It understands what Mafia is actually good at — atmosphere, character, and a tightly told crime story — and it strips away everything that was dragging the series down. The Sicilian setting is gorgeous, the coming-of-age tale is genuinely affecting, and the linear structure is a deliberate, vindicating return to roots.

For long-time fans who watched the series lose its way, this is the redemption arc. For newcomers, it is the perfect place to start: a self-contained prequel that asks nothing of you except a few evenings and a tolerance for tragedy.

This is what happens when a developer remembers what made a series special and has the courage to build that, and only that.

---

👨 The Dad Angle — When and How to Play It

The Old Country is emphatically not a family game. It is rated M for Mature for blood, strong language, and violence, and it earns that rating with a story that goes to genuinely dark places. This is firmly after-bedtime territory, played with headphones and a clear evening.

But for dads specifically, the appeal is exactly its restraint. This is not a game that demands a hundred hours and a spreadsheet to track its systems. It is a focused, finishable story you can actually complete in a reasonable timeframe — the rarest luxury in modern gaming when your free hours are measured in fragments. You can start it and you will see the end, and the end is worth getting to.

On time investment: budget twelve to fifteen hours. Ideally play it in fewer, longer sittings rather than scattered ten-minute bursts, because the deliberate pacing rewards immersion and the back half lands hardest when you can stay with it.

On the right setup: Sicily looks stunning, so a capable display with HDR pays real dividends, and a good headset brings out the score and the weight of the period gunplay. This is a game that respects craft, and it deserves a setup that returns the favor.

---

---

FAQ

Is Mafia: The Old Country a good entry point for new players?

Yes. It is a prequel set chronologically before the trilogy, it tells a self-contained story, and its tight linear structure makes it the most approachable Mafia game. You do not need to have played any earlier entry.

How long does Mafia: The Old Country take to beat?

The main story runs roughly 12 to 15 hours. It is on the shorter side for the genre, but it is paced deliberately with very little filler, so the runtime feels earned rather than padded.

Is it open world like Mafia III?

No, and that is the point. The Old Country is a tight, linear, story-first experience. It drops the bloated open world of Mafia III in favor of focused, handcrafted missions, which is exactly what made the original Mafia great.

Does Mafia: The Old Country run well on PS5?

Yes. It runs smoothly on PS5 with stable performance and fast loading, and the Sicilian vistas show off the lighting and detail beautifully on a modern display.

Is the game suitable for kids?

No. It is rated M for Mature for blood, strong language, and violence. It is a serious, brutal crime story best played after the kids are asleep.