Mafia: Definitive Edition

Intense overall intensity
Highest flag: Language — strong
AdventureHistoricalShooter

What's in it

Substances player uses or trades
High

Set during Prohibition, characters drink and smoke cigars and cigarettes throughout, and missions involve bootleg liquor smuggling.

Language strong
High

Strong profanity, including 'fuck', recurs in the mobsters' dialogue throughout.

Violence realistic
Moderate

Realistic third-person gunfights and melee against human enemies with blood on characters and the environment; no dismemberment or gore.

Dark themes intense
Moderate

The story follows a mobster's rise and fall through betrayal, revenge and the on-screen deaths of named characters.

Crime & lawlessness player commits crime
Moderate

The player carries out organized-crime jobs as core gameplay: shootouts, extortion, robbery and contract killings of rival gangsters.

Sexual content suggestive
Low

Tommy pursues a romance with Sarah that stays at the level of flirtation and affection, with nothing sexual shown.

Who can reach your kid

What it is

Mafia: Definitive Edition is a story-driven, single-player crime game set in the fictional 1930s American city of Lost Heaven. Playing as cab driver Tommy Angelo, who is drawn into the Salieri crime family, you drive period cars and motorcycles through an open city and carry out mob work: gunfights against rival gangsters and police, fistfights, car chases, theft and contract killings, with blood shown on hits but no gore or dismemberment. The Prohibition-era setting means bootleg liquor is central to the plot, and characters drink and smoke on screen. The dialogue carries strong profanity including 'fuck', and a light romance between Tommy and Sarah stays at flirtation with nothing sexual depicted. The narrative is a bleak gangster tragedy in which named characters are betrayed and killed.

How it's framed

The game frames organised crime as a trap rather than a fantasy: Tommy's rise through the Salieri family is told in flashback as a confession to a detective, and the story steadily shows loyalty curdling into betrayal, murder and his own violent death. Violence is presented as the everyday currency of the mob world and is treated matter-of-factly during play, while the overarching plot casts the criminal life as something that consumes the people in it.

Details

Developer
Hangar 13
Publisher
2K
Released
2020-09-25
Metacritic 77critic score (third-party) · out of 100

Similar games

We built this because we needed it

Balanced Play pools your kids' game time into one budget across Steam, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and more. We're taking 100 founding families — free for life.

Claim a founding spot →

Free for life for the first 100. No card, no spam.