I am at that stage in life where my options are narrowing when it comes to the jobs I dreamed of doing as a child. I am too old to play football for Scotland, I will not own a brewery or become an astronaut. (In retrospect, aspiring to a job that combined all three was a tad ambitious.) It’s also risky to give up any job in this economy without knowing whether the new one will work out. Luckily, thanks to video games, I can try them out before taking the plunge. And you are never too old to be a gangster, are you? Which is why I started playing Mafia: Definitive Edition.
I did play it briefly in its original incarnation, 70bn years ago. Not for long, though, because it had driving sections as unintuitive and poorly controlled as that buggy on Mars.
For me, the fantasy of being a mobster was always less about the murder, extortion and whatnot, and more about the social side: just hanging with guys and having bants. That is more than adequately represented in this game. As soon as I start showing interest in the bar owner’s daughter the guys tell me that I’m “always soft when it comes to broads”. Boy, do those jabronis really have my number!
The main character Tommy’s story is how I imagine my own path into the mafia. I was born from Polish stock on the east coast of Scotland and therefore could not trace my lineage back to Sicily, nor did I have any blood connection to the five families. Like Tommy, I imagined that I too would start off as a taxi driver, whisk some wounded guys away from rival mobsters one night, and do such a quality job that I would be invited to come and do some more work for them. This is the mobster equivalent of a five-star review on Uber.
You don’t actually have to do a lot of driving in the updated edition. You can skip between destinations with the press of a button, although this does mean you miss out on in-journey chat which helps give the story more detail. And it is a good story. It’s not Goodfellas or The Godfather, but it’s solid, and I thought the voice acting was pretty strong.
The script is full of cliches, but I find them reassuring because they remind me of the mafia movies I grew up loving. Politicians are always “on the take”. Gangsters are always wanting to eventually “go legit”. You don’t save lives, you save “asses”. You don’t do things, you “do what you gotta do.” You aren’t brave, you have “a real set of balls”. Not just any set of balls, but a set that warrants frequent commentary and admiration. My boss, Don Salieri, kept telling my work colleagues to “look at the set of balls on this kid”. Is it any wonder the mafia don’t have a HR department? After one meeting everyone exits the room leaving not one but two cigars burning in an ashtray. So, I don’t think much of the health and safety in this workplace, either.
Some things are a bit silly. My character is still called “The Kid” when he is 30; perhaps they’re bootlegging an elixir of eternal youth alongside all the bourbon. I have to go and see a guy called Vincenzo to get weapons. I am frequently told he will have just what I need. Most of the time it ends up being a baseball bat. I could have got that from Toys “R” Us.
But I find this game so comforting to play in a predictable, undemanding way. For the most part it’s like settling down with a cosy crime thriller or a potato-based soup, though there are a couple of levels that are insanely hard: a race that was completely unforgiving, a motorbike chase with zero room for error, and a level where you have to shoot down a plane for which I not only had to drop down to easy difficulty, but also had to turn the controller sensitivity down so low that my gunsight moved like an ocean tanker. (Thanks to Reddit for that last tip, and also for the comments from other people who had suffered through that level – it was like a video game PTSD group.)
But just when I am feeling comfortable in this lovely mafia job, with the bants and the big bucks, one character gets bored and fed up with this life. “We sit around for six months busting balls and I get rusty. Then I’m fighting to stay awake while the Don tells me one of his stories,” he says.
I guess that like all jobs, even the mafia gets boring after a while.