MAFIA

MAFIA
Posted:2002-07-18 By Master Chief Number of View:30737
MAFIA By :Master Chief Posted:2002-07-18 xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source Mafia Publisher: Gathering of Developers Developer: Illusion Softworks Genre: Action ESRB: Mature System Requirements  Minimum: PIII 500, 96MB RAM, Win98/ME/2K/XP, 3D graphics accel. Recommended: PIII 700, 128MB RAM   Crime has always made solid entertainment. Movies have long thrived on cops-and-robbers escapades, and recently, so have computer games. By way of Eidos\' Gangsters and Hitman, JoWooD\'s The Sting!, SCi\'s The Italian Job, Xicat\'s Sniper and Rockstar\'s Grand Theft Auto III, illegal violence has been in style. Now Czech Republic-based Illusion Softworks, creators of the acclaimed Hidden & Dangerous series, has developed Mafia for Gathering of Developers. Focused on stealing cars, avoiding the police and operating in the criminal underworld, Mafia is a gritty third-person combination of driving and shooting.   The story in Mafia centers around Tommy Angelo during the heyday of organized crime in the 1930\'s. He\'s a cab driver who\'s in the wrong place at the wrong time - killers fleeing from the scene of a crime jump in his taxi and demand to be driven away - and gets sucked into mob activity. After receiving lots of money for this, Angelo decides to join up. As years of slimy activity pass, Angelo begins to experience some personal growth and see the dark side of his new profession, particularly when friends of his own family are designated to be whacked. The game reveals his ascendance from a lowly foot soldier to an envied "made man" through a series of flashbacks. The plot is both absorbing and compelling, hinting at how easy it would be for any of us to get caught up in the enticements surrounding a life of crime.   There are over 12 miles of a sprawling 1930\'s American city called Lost Heaven to explore. The urban metropolis is decidedly alive, teeming with moving vehicles and pedestrians, ethnically and socio-economically distinct neighborhoods, and functioning mass transportation systems such as streetcar and rail lines. The people walking around even respond to your actions, as you\'ll discover if you pull out a gun. What you pass through is not like a Hollywood set, where the exterior is pretty but there\'s nothing inside; instead, a lot is happening within the different buildings, such as a restaurant, bar, working casino and hotel. Unfortunately for lawbreakers, there are also vigilant police officers - on foot and in squad cars - ever ready to apprehend miscreants.   Perhaps the best facet of Mafia is the availability of over 60 magnificent classic cars. There is even an illuminating "Carcyclopedia" displaying all the models. To expand your fleet, you steal what you want. The car physics are highly authentic; for example, the maximum speed of the vehicles is quite limited, and tire traction is significantly lower on grass than on paved surfaces. What\'s more, cars slow down when they ascend an incline, speed up when going downhill and bounce when traveling over bumpy surfaces. The handling is noticeably different for the various vehicle models as well. Best of all, these beautiful automobiles are not immune to physical damage, with collisions leading to scrapes and dents, blown tires, flaming engines, detached headlights and bullet holes in windows and even gas tanks. In the frenzied chase scenes, passengers lean way out of vehicles and shoot at pursuing police and other gangsters. The vehicles help make possible frenetic and exciting battles. Augmenting the car chase combat are direct person-to-person shootouts in closed off areas. You frequently can choose between a cunning or blast-everything-in-sight approach. Hiding behind intervening obstacles like parked cars is often part of an effective strategy. Some of the most challenging and complex fights occur between multiple members of your gang and several members of the opposition. In combat, you can aim for individual enemies or blow up their vehicles. The intensity of the battles is indescribably high and always entertaining. To facilitate the combat, you have 12 different weapons at your disposal, including a Colt revolver, grenades, a pump action and sawed-off shotgun, a Smith and Wesson 27 Magnum, a Springfield rifle, a Thompson Tommy gun, and even a knife, crowbar and baseball bat. Each has a different accuracy level and maximum range that is very much in tune with the capabilities of the arms replicated. When you shoot people, you can see what part of their bodies you hit, and they react accordingly. Unlike many titles of this type, you actually face the real-world limits of scarce ammunition and the need to reload weapons. With more powerful arms, you have to worry about recoil, and with weak ones, you have to hit your target several times to get the job done. Unlike Grand Theft Auto III, the violence is never gratuitous, but rather is essential to the advancement of the plot.   Over 20 missions of varying lengths and difficulty, most of which begin at the colorful Salieri Bar, provide the principal challenge. Objectives include guarding a cash pickup, protecting a woman from criminals, fixing a car race, hijacking a vehicle, subduing a rival gang, taking revenge and, of course, killing sometimes not-so-innocent targets. In every case, however, sound driving is essential. While the first few missions are a bit sluggish, the action really picks up later on. Although you have some choice as to how to approach the individual missions, you move through the game in a fixed sequence.   Finishing the campaign opens up an extra mode called Free Ride Extreme. Here, you get to drive around the city without the pesky police on your tail, overcome a series of challenges and, in the process, unlock special cars. It\'s also possible to set the levels of population and vehicle traffic to your liking. You really get to take the restraints off, wreaking havoc wherever you go and doing whatever you please. You can even earn money from cab fares and use it on new weapons, car repair or medical assistance. While this mode of play is not nearly as long or as enjoyable as the primary missions, the no-limits ability to zoom around town and create chaos reminds me of Microsoft\'s Midtown Madness. Graphics: The visuals in Mafia are generally fantastic and sport incredible detail. The vintage vehicles are so voluptuous and rendered with such an extraordinarily high polygonal count that I want to own a real one. The characters are very believable, with smooth and realistic animations of individual body parts and considerable detail, particularly in the incredibly expressive character faces. The buildings are all beautifully designed, with many intricate facets and very few bland textures or mindlessly repeated designs. The use of color and lighting is exquisite, with some of the vistas being picturesque enough to appear in a painting, and the smoke and shadows effects are outstanding. The ever-present cinematics are among the best I have ever seen on the PC; their quality, combined with the expert camera work, makes you feel as if you\'re watching a movie rather than playing a computer game. The deficiencies are quite minor. You\'ll see occasional pop-up in the distance, the changes in the weather and the time of day do not occur dynamically, you may lose sight of your vehicle at odd angles and a little clipping is evident. Illusion\'s proprietary LS3D engine possesses startlingly high potential but is a decided resource hog. You need to have a machine well above the minimum system requirements, with a high-end video card and lots of RAM, to take advantage of all of the graphics features and to avoid chugging frame rates.     Interface: Mafia permits input from the keyboard and mouse as well as a gamepad, joystick and even steering wheel. Force feedback is fully supported, and you can even adjust various dimensions of the response. While you can navigate on foot quite intuitively, the default settings for shifting gears, looking around, using the handbrake and clutch driving are quite strange. You\'ll wish you had more fingers no matter which control system you use.   The menu system and the in-game screen are both simple and easy to follow. A convenient map of the city showing your current position and the direction you\'re traveling is easy to access if you get lost or need to find a particular spot. However, Mafia chooses not to allow you to save wherever you please, and even though there are a ton of automatic save points, this is inconvenient at times.     Gameplay: Mafia steals your attention with its engrossing setting and gameplay right from the start. Unlike many crime titles, how you handle the driving is a central component of the fun, and unlike combat racing releases, you actually have a compelling reason to zip from place to place. In other words, you need to like both driving and pretending to break the law in order to get the most out of this title. With the whole game taking over ten hours to complete, there are a huge variety of assignments to execute properly. The frenzied fight scenes are doubtlessly the highlight of this offering. Because of this, you may get a bit impatient with all of the driving, and want to get immediately to your next destination. I enjoy tooling around town because I like virtual racing, but I can easily imagine some players getting tired of this after a while. The city driving sometimes seems a bit ancillary to the main thrust of the missions.     Multiplayer: Mafia does not have a multiplayer component.     Sound FX: The sound effects in Mafia match the quality of the visuals. The characters\' vocal effects are compelling and individualistic, and made all the more believable by adequate lip-syncing. The subtle changes over time in Angelo\'s own voice are a decent indication of his gradual changes in mood and perspective. Even the shouts of pedestrians are right on the mark. The roar of car engines and the boom of gunshots all sound just right. The ambient noises are expertly done, with, for example, falling rain making different sounds depending on the surface it hits. My only complaint is that the 3D sound could have been better implemented.     Musical Score: Mafia\'s soundtrack effectively recreates period music from the 1930\'s. The tone of the songs varies from relaxing to alarming, depending on the situation. Tense sequences elicit a full orchestral outburst, for instance. Whatever your taste -- jazz, swing or big band – it\'s all here. However, the background music should play more frequently, and the existing score does get repetitive at times.     Intelligence & Difficulty: Beating Mafia is no piece of cake; the farther you progress, the greater the challenge. Novices to this kind of action may find themselves reloading a lot to get through the missions. In particular, they may have difficulty becoming expert drivers, even as adept use of the clutch and handbrake is vital to eluding pursuers. Patience and perseverance are essential. A well-designed tutorial allows those who need it to get used to the controls and the demands of the gameplay; an informative manual stylishly designed in newspaper format helps out, too.   The artificial intelligence of the computer-controlled police officers and opposing gang members is mixed. Sometimes, these people drive like madmen and are constantly bashing into you. The police in particular drive a lot faster than you, and often catch up even if you\'re far ahead, so you have to closely track them on your radar and frequently must shoot out their tires in order to get away. Furthermore, your criminal adversaries sometimes intelligently utilize cover, while in other cases moronically squander it.     Overall: Mafia is not only at the very top of its genre, it\'s also head-and-shoulders better than its nearest competitor. With gorgeous graphics, an enthralling story, nifty sound and music, and fun gameplay, it\'s a blast from beginning to end. The designers clearly used exceptional care in creating this masterpiece, and with minor exceptions, the attention to polish and detail is consistently evident. You\'ll get to fulfill your fantasies not only of being part of the mob, but also of growing and changing while in this sordid profession. Most importantly, you\'ll really feel as though you\'ve been magically transported back to the 1930\'s. If you don\'t mind being seduced by the sinister exploits of organized crime, you cannot miss Mafia. xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source we would be happy to answer for your question . if you have suggestion or comment regarding this review our support would be glad to help just join our forum and ask u will get the best answer to discuss check our forum section :-) RATE THIS REVIEW 1 2 3 4 5    / 5   View Stat

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