For a game set in 1904, Mafia: The Old Country is a surprisingly good driving sim

The Mafia games have always committed to their historical settings. Despite never troubling the licensing departments of any real-world manufacturers, their fictional rosters of automobiles have grounded each title in a time and a place. Driving a big motorised cigar on bicycle wheels between missions really reminds you you’re in pre-war America, and over the years that’s been key to discerning them from the GTA series, which casts a shadow over all who dare to release open world games with cars and shooting in them.

Out now for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, Mafia: The Old Country takes the series back further than ever before, to the lush vineyards and sulphur mines of 1900s Sicily. We were a bit surprised, then, to find that it’s absolutely full of cars.

Driving around the titular old country in this game feels like launching an Impreza around The Witcher III’s Velen, or bombing around a Center Parcs – the space just isn’t designed for such raucous machinery. If rattling along in a Bolt Model 1 in the original 2002 Mafia: City of Lost Heaven felt precarious, operating The Old Country’s steel horses feels downright maniacal.

These roads are meant for the quant clip-clop of horses, to be taken at speeds at which you can enjoy the pleasant views, like citrus trees in blossom and rolling volcanic topography. The tracks are simply too small for Scandinavian flicks or J-turns. Believe us, we’ve tried.

And in a funny way, that’s what makes this game worth playing. Developer Hangar 13 may not have reinvented the cover shooter with this one, but there’s something inherently preposterous in trying to run and gun like a Grand Theft Auto protagonist in this setting that elevates the Cosa Nostra action.

You’re a young miner, a Carusu in the Sicilian dialect, who makes an enemy of the local Don by getting a little bit knife fighty with him. Sensing that your next performance review may not go well, you flee to the local farmland, where you’re rather fortuitously taken in by rival Don (this one with far more lustrous hair and a better waistcoat, so you know he’s a good one).

So begins a rise up through the ranks of organised crime in its earliest form, back when extortion was conducted on horseback and enemies could leave the country in the time it would take you to reload your gun. There’s romance, betrayal, the breaking of various Omertàs, and a plot arc that you’ve already mentally seen two beats ahead at any given time. But that’s fine.

No, honestly, it is. The story isn’t groundbreaking here despite some strong performances from its central cast, and the way the missions are plotted out feels well-trodden to say the least. But this is a game that’s had its nose in so many history books, it can really sell you on the idea that you’re inhabiting 1900s Sicily. There are incidental details all over this game world that make it feel that tiny bit more alive, like recipes on kitchen counters, authentically dressed rooms in period-authentic furnishings down to the smallest detail, and smatterings of Sicilian vernacular throughout.

Even the cars, fictitious though they are, and incongruous with the unsullied bucolic splendour of the place, feel of a piece with the game world. Their manufacturers, like Bolt, DuFort and Trautenberg, have been present across the series so it feels like you’re driving the origins of each company.

This certainly doesn’t represent a high tide mark for a series that once lit the way industry-wide for linear storytelling in an open-world setting. Where there were once imaginative, expectation-shattering mission narratives, now there’s A-to-B treks from shootouts to knife fights to horse rides to drives. But with such a scarcity of decent story-led single-player games lately, and the sharply drawn setting of historical Sicily, it feels easy to turn a blind eye to the prosaic bits and just enjoy the drive.