My mad dash to play and finish as many 2025 games before finalizing my end-of-the-year list continued over the weekend. So that’s why, months after it launched and we reviewed it, I started and then finished Mafia: The Old Country on Sunday. And folks, I miss when AAA games weren’t all live-service-infected open-world action-RPG grinds.
In August, 2K and Hangar 13’s latest Mafia game, The Old Country, launched on consoles and PC. A prequel to the entire series set in the early 1900s, this entry is mostly its own self-contained story with small gestures toward the rest of the Mafia-verse. This time around, you play as Enzo, a young man who escapes a horrible life as a slave in a large sulfur mine in Italy. Enzo lands in the lap of a local mafia family, and over the course of about 10 hours, depending on how fast you play, he goes from a nobody to a made man and trusted soldier in Don Torrisi’s criminal organization, all while hiding a relationship with the Don’s daughter. And folks, I had a blast with The Old Country.
I’m not here to review it, as we already have a review of The Old Country up on the site. Instead, I’m here to publicly ask developers and publishers to make more of these kinds of games. Remember when studios used to spend a lot of money making exciting 8 to 12-hour campaigns that featured lots of cool moments and set pieces?
This used to be so common in the PS2 era and even into the Xbox 360 era; we’d get plenty of single-player, linear games that weren’t overstuffed open worlds covered in seasonal content, battle passes, or live events, and which didn’t take 200 hours to finish. For a long time, we got so many games like The Old Country, games that featured big budgets and impressive visuals, provided an exciting weekend of fun and, maybe, offered some collectibles and secrets to find on a replay. Did these games reinvent the wheel or offer incredibly new and unique gameplay mechanics? No. And neither does The Old Country. It’s a cover-based shooter with solid third-person stealth gameplay, some vehicle segments, and plenty of somewhat novel one-on-one knife fights.
And yes, I know about indie games. I cover them weekly at Kotaku and play many of them in my spare time. A lot of them are shorter experiences that are laser-focused on delivering a linear experience. That’s great. But it’s not simply that The Old Country is “short” compared to something like Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It’s also that it still looks and plays like a big AAA video game; it just doesn’t demand you spend 12 hours crafting swords and completing checklists. You get all the cinematic set pieces and high-end cutscenes that modern AAA games often feature, but it’s all provided in a tidy little package you can finish without devoting a few weeks of your life to it. It’s so nice. So refreshing. And it’s something I truly miss in 2025.
The Old Country has seemingly sold very well for 2K Games, and that makes me hopeful that the team at Hangar 13 will be able to build another game like this, be it something new or a Mafia sequel. Because I love big games like this that show off how powerful modern consoles are and look great on a big 4K TV. I’m just tired of having to spend 70+ hours in each of these games to finish them.
Mafia: The Old Country is a fantastic reminder that games don’t need to take six years to develop, that smaller, more focused games can still be “AAA” and can still be successful, too. A very good lesson for publishers to take note of as we move into 2026.
