Once in the Mafia, you cannot leave it. This is not provided for by the code. Once you start playing Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, you cannot just leave it. This is not provided by the developers.
Tom
Tom, the main character and the guy you play, had a difficult childhood, adolescence, and youth. And as soon as he took up his adult life, it turned upside down. Unexpectedly for himself, Tommy changed his profession – from a taxi driver to a gangster. Don Salieri accepted him into the Family without unnecessary sentimentality but generally friendly. Being in the Mafia isn’t so bad, Tom decided, after getting a new car…
Scenario
Everything is excellent in Mafia: the city, cars, police officers, gangsters, guns, conversations, affairs, friends, and women. But above all, the plot is great. Or rather, not a plot, but a script. Mafia is more like a movie than any game you’ve ever seen. America, the 30s, Prohibition, Great Depression; black Cadillacs, white Buicks, Italian bars, expensive suits, cigars, hats; a baseball bat or Tommy gun, a chase, a bullet-riddled windshield, a dead driver, blood – the game is full of film components.
This story has a place for everything that we are used to seeing in a good film: strong friendship, sudden love, vile betrayal, and bloody revenge, and faithful by virtue of its simplicity of life philosophy – if you are in the Mafia, you better forget about sincere feelings and simple joys…
Cars
Mafia would be a very different game if it weren’t for its cars. At the disposal of Tom is the Family garage, with 60 expensive models appearing from mission to mission – he steals some of them himself, others are introduced to him by Ralph, a mechanic in the service of Don Salieri.
And, the behavior of each car is worked out according to a whole lot of parameters, including acceleration, the maximum number of revolutions, the distribution of mass along the axes, the type of suspension, the coefficient of friction, is worthy of at least a salute with ballistic missiles.
So you can do great chases in Mafia. You can exceed the city speed limit under the nose of a policeman, and he will chase you. With a bumper, you knock down road signs, telephone booths, and fire columns, from which elastic fountains of water begin to beat. Passers-by scatter from the sidewalk in panic, but some of them are not agile enough. Sharp turns drifts, knocked out headlights and crumpled bumpers of oncoming cars, dizzying somersaults on the asphalt and in the air, the savory smell of burnt tires, chaos and destruction behind us, an innocent city ahead.
Adrenaline gushes like fuel from a punctured tank when two cars with municipality emblems hit you on the left and right and let the third cut off from the front. Hands behind your back, handcuffs on your wrists, nose to the ground – mission failed. But more often – satanic laughter, when you manage to stick a police car with a bumper in a post and take the other into the oncoming lane and go sideways a moment before it wedges into a dense traffic flow and collides head-on with some unlucky taxi driver. You are alone against the whole city – and this is an unforgettable, heady feeling of war and freedom.
Music
The authentic atmosphere of the 30s is recreated through the brilliant design of buildings, streets, canals, and bridges and through sound and music. The soundtrack of “Mafia” is absolutely authentic, as they say now. The recordings arrived on the CD track straight from old gramophone records with black and white covers.
In the midst of swingomania, a cheerful boogie-woogie is heard from the speakers, in some missions jazz reigns or popular tenors sweetly sing about a certain business deal with partners or a dark-eyed brunette – and to this musical relaxation, you drive along the pavement in a sparkling car or fire from Colt on the impudent pumpkins of Don Morello’s fellows, or you hit someone in the cerebellum with a baseball bat, or – ah! – see the girl home.
The music rushes in gentle waves, it envelops you in a soft sound, and you believe more and more in this city and the Mafia – listening to the screaming of the frightened hotel employees and the wounded waiter desperately screaming until he is shot, and revolver shots crack with whips and crash into Eardrums Shotgun pops. And then – the horns of the horn, the roar of the revving engine, and the calm ride to Chinatown with the carefree play of the Saxon… Life is amazingly good!
