If last year's sales charts are any indication, crime does pay. Two of the most popular games released on PCs and consoles were Take-Two's Max Payne and Grand Theft Auto III, both of which were gritty, violent action games that explored what happens when angry thugs get their hands on automatic weapons. Later this year, GodGames will release a new game that will take a different approach to the life of a computer-game criminal. Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven will be an action game from Czech studio Illusion Softworks that will take place in a huge American city in the 1930's--a place that's run by warring crime syndicates that have the police on their payrolls and where even the lowliest thug can become a high-ranking mobster if he's ambitious and unscrupulous enough.

I got a job for you, so listen up.

GodGames was kind enough to stop by GameSpot's offices and give us a firsthand demonstration of Mafia, and despite the fact that we haven't heard much about the game for some time, it looks extremely promising. Mafia will be a third-person action game in which you'll play as Tommy, a lowly cabbie who ends up falling in with the Salieri family, a wealthy and powerful group that has lots of influence, but is also at odds with the rival Morello family. Over the course of the game's 20 huge missions, you'll be able to take Tommy through various secondary quests that can involve anything from sneaking into guarded buildings and assassinating key characters, to cracking safes, to stealing a prized racecar. Like Grand Theft Auto III before it, Mafia will allow you to hit the streets on foot or behind the wheel of a car. You'll spend an approximately equal amount of time doing both, though you can expect to be jumping in and out of stolen cars and diving out of the way of enemy gunmen in the same mission later on in the game.

From what we've seen, Illusion Softworks isn't just trying to make Mafia look great--the developer is clearly attempting to render its 12-square-mile city with as much detail as possible. Mafia has some very impressive-looking special effects, including lightning on a stormy night that illuminates the surrounding clouds and sky and muzzle flashes on guns that flare out in the darkness. We watched an absolutely spectacular firefight between gunmen armed with rapid-firing tommy guns in a dark garage, and the continuous illumination provided by the blazing guns actually lit up the entire area from all sides as the gangsters all fired bursts, ducked for cover, reloaded, repositioned, and fired again. In addition, all of Mafia's buildings and streets are adorned with highly detailed textures, and the game will have plenty of appropriate ambient sound, including ragtime and swing music heard on radios or played by live bands, as well as chatter from the city's inhabitants as they go about their daily business. Mafia's citizens are all brought to life with very detailed and lifelike motion-captured animation, as well as fully lip-synced facial animation when spoken to. Tommy can speak to any characters in the game simply by walking up to them and right-clicking, and each character will have something different to say--especially when Tommy is foolish enough to draw a gun in plain view of civilians, who will run for cover and shout for help.

That's a nice-looking set of wheels.

Fortunately, some of Tommy's jobs won't even require him to step out of the car. Over the course of Mafia's missions, Tommy will leave behind his life as a cab driver and become a made man who is proficient at picking locks and stealing cars and is also a top-notch getaway driver. Mafia will have about 60 different vehicles to choose from, including roadsters, taxi cabs, racecars, and even hijacked police vehicles. Mafia will render each of these classic 1930s cars faithfully, and when Tommy steps into a new one, it'll look as pretty as can be, complete with reflective surfaces on the chassis and working headlights. But when you're driving for the Mafia, you won't always have the luxury of empty, quiet streets and a full tank of gas. As we saw, Mafia's cars can have their windows shot out, their frames peppered with bullet holes, their bumpers torn clean off, and their tires flattened or wrenched off the car.