Mafia The City of Lost Heaven preview

An Offer You Can't Refuse

Cheese it! The cops!

Of course, when you're driving on a mission for the Mafia, your paint job is often the least of your worries. When Tommy's behind the wheel, he'll have to make sure he avoids any enemy fire, protects any important passengers he's carrying, and avoids any run-ins with John Q. Law. In Mafia, the cops have been bribed not to lock you up and throw away the key, but they will pull you over, apprehend you, and cause you to fail your current mission, so you'll have to make sure you don't go over the speed limit or run through too many red lights (or over too many pedestrians). If you do, a "wanted" meter will appear at the top of the screen, and you'll be chased by police vehicles that will try to run you off the road. If you can get away from the cops and stay away, your wanted meter will eventually empty out and you'll be in the clear, though later on in the game, you may want to hop out of your current vehicle and steal a cop car for kicks. Like in Grand Theft Auto III, you'll have a car garage where you can park the various cars you've stolen, though you'll actually be able to keep more than one car at a time. In fact, you'll eventually be able to amass a huge stable of different vehicles that you'll be able to choose from in your later missions, and the game will actually let you set the city's speed limit to a whopping 40 miles per hour if you'd prefer to joyride at high speeds without worrying about the cops.

There will also be plenty of missions in Mafia in which Tommy will be on foot. Mafia will have a great variety of different missions that can involve stealth, theft, assassination at long range with a sniper rifle, down-and-dirty gunfights, and more. Regardless of whether he's on foot or behind the wheel, he'll receive a mission briefing in the form of an in-engine cutscene. These cutscenes generally seem to look terrific so far, thanks to the game's expressive motion-captured character animation, which makes the game's surly mobsters and terrified victims truly believable. Tommy can pull up his mission objectives at any time by pressing F1, but since some of his missions are timed, it's usually best to go right in and get started.

Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?

On foot, Tommy might start out with a simple handgun, though he'll eventually pick up high-powered rifles, sawed-off shotguns, sniper rifles, and tommy guns-- the best weapons from the top designers of the era, like Smith & Wesson and Colt. Though the game won't be an exacting weapons simulation, Mafia's firearms will be modeled after their real-world counterparts. For example, the Colt .45 caliber handgun will be a compact, fast, and powerful weapon that's relatively accurate, but it won't pack as much punch as a shotgun. As we saw, the shotguns in the game will help clear guarded doorways beautifully, but they'll have a very significant kick, and they'll also require extra reload time, often forcing Tommy to run for cover so he can safely slap in a few more shells. The powerful tommy gun won't need to be reloaded as often, but as you'd expect, the kick from the weapon's rapid firing will pitch the barrel of the weapon upward the longer it's fired continuously, making it most effective when used in short bursts. While on foot, Tommy can take cover behind cars and walls and run, jump, crawl, and roll to the side when he's under fire.

Tommy will also need to use more discreet weapons like baseball bats, crowbars, and knives to quietly dispatch his enemies in stealth missions, since none of Mafia's firearms can be equipped with any kind of silencer. Over the course of each mission, he'll have to complete various secondary quests that can often be resolved in numerous ways. In one mission we watched, Tommy broke into a mansion accompanied by a safecracker in order to steal important documents and make off with them, but his escape was nearly foiled when the owner of the house came home early. In that mission, and in others like it, Tommy will have the option of attempting to flee to safety using stealth, but he can also pull out his guns and shoot his way out. In other missions, Tommy may have a more useful helper who will provide cover fire as he goes about completing his objectives.

It's hard to believe that Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven--which looks so good but has received so little press--will be out so soon. This very impressive action game looks like it should take some of the best elements of games like Grand Theft Auto III and Max Payne and combine them with an original premise and extremely high production values. Mafia looks very, very promising, and hopefully it will turn out to be as good as it looks when it's released at the end of this month.