Growing up, my father and I never saw eye to eye. We were always engaged in an ideological war, as my passion for creativity clashed with his cold focus on making money and putting food on the table above all else. There was a cultural divide between us that took me nearly two decades to understand. While I was born and raised in Massachusetts, he grew up on the outskirts of Capestrano, a small town nestled into the Italian countryside.
I wouldn’t understand how different those worlds were until I watched Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 neorealist classic about a poor father trying to provide for his family in post-World War 2 Rome. It was through that film that I felt like I really saw my father for the first time. The film is an honest portrait of Italian anxiety of the time, depicting how poverty pushed decent men to desperation. Even if he was in America now and doing well for himself, there was still a part of his brain that would always be struggling to scrape by in the hills of Abruzzo.
In its best moments, Mafia: The Old Country keeps that context front and center to deepen an otherwise typical mob story. All the shakedowns and shootouts you’d expect are there, but they aren’t set against the gritty streets of Chicago; they’re happening on an island ravaged by poverty in the early 1900s. It isn’t just a change of scenery that makes for some pleasant open-world exploration, but a framework for actually understanding why the mafia grew as a criminal empire and how so many Italians of the era chose a life of violence. It’s a vital moment of nuance for a series built on historical clichés, even if the flat action makes it feel more invested in the American West than Italy at times.
Hangar 13’s tightly directed action-adventure game opens with its most impactful sequence. I’m not dressed up in a fine suit and thrown into a cinematic gunfight between warring families. Instead, I’m left toiling in the mines. The story centers around Enzo, a poor working man trying to survive in Sicily circa 1904. When a dangerous job carried out at the request of an uncaring foreman goes awry, a fed-up Enzo hits a breaking point. He needs an escape from poverty, and that’s exactly what Don Torrisi, the head of a local crime family, offers him.
It’s a setup that so many tales like this too often skirt around. The media has long been fascinated with the mafia, but more for its iconography than its history. Organized crime is treated as a shortcut to making a sexy flick with high stakes and lots of action potential baked into the premise. Few pieces of media are actually interested in the conditions that birthed Italy’s history of organized crime. It’s a shame because the history of Sicily is especially compelling. The island was a hotbed for boiling social issues throughout the 1800s, as peasants were pushed deeper and deeper into poverty at the hands of barons implementing high tax rates. A distrust of authority in the wake of national unification intersected with a rise in banditry, and the modern mafia was born somewhere within that tension. Organized crime didn’t rise just for the thrill of it.
While The Old Country doesn’t offer a full history lesson, that context is an undercurrent that can be felt throughout the 12-hour story. It’s just as much about Enzo fighting labor issues that plagued exploited Italians in the early 1900s as it is about a criminal turf war. Even when Don Torrisi’s issues with the Spadaro family take center stage as Enzo rises through the ranks, The Old Country doesn’t let you forget why everyone ended up in this mess of bloodshed to begin with.
That dynamic is baked into the very structure of the game. The opening hours, where Enzo is struggling to survive as a peasant, can feel sluggish. There’s barely any “action” in the first three hours, as Enzo navigates a winding mine, loads crates of wine into trucks, and performs more menial labor. You’re left itching to escape into that romanticized mafia fantasy, which makes the moment where it finally takes off all the more enticing. Soon enough, I’m racing sports cars, getting drunk on fine wine, and whacking Don Torrisi’s rivals. Sicily no longer owns me; I make the rules, and it’s intoxicating.
The mob is just another dangerous job where you answer to a different kind of boss.
The Old Country tries to emphasize that idea by presenting Sicily as an explorable open world dotted with some loose, but unnecessary collectibles. There are fox statues to find, photo spots, and newspaper clippings that fill in more historical context of the area. It all feels a bit tacked on, as there’s no natural break in the tight story where it makes sense to explore, but it does give players the opportunity to soak in their newfound freedom. The claustrophobic passages of the mines are gradually replaced with quaint Mediterranean vistas. Driving a rundown old car through the dirt streets and taking it all in becomes a luxury only afforded to those willing to get their hands dirty. You can understand why Enzo would be so desperate to keep himself above ground as Don Torrisi’s requests become bloodier.
Though that rise to power is effectively timed, the middle act is where The Old Country leaves itself vulnerable. Beneath a sharply written script that deeply cares about Italian history is a fairly run-of-the-mill stealth action game. When Enzo is sent out to take care of something for the family, it usually means trudging through a linear sneaking sequence where every wandering guard is placed in a clear path I’m supposed to backstab my way through. There’s no real need to toss a bottle to cause a distraction or get creative with my routing; there’s always a mechanical approach to my target laid out in front of me.
The same is true when those moments ultimately give way to cover-based third-person shootouts. A few guys come running in, I pop out of cover to shoot them down, loot the bodies, and move forward until more goons flood in. There are some extra guns to collect and some play-style customization in equippable rosary beads, but the action lacks spice. It was in one of these sequences where I first started to feel like Hangar 13 was less interested in creating a mafia game than an Italian spin on Red Dead Redemption. Its middle chapters especially feel more influenced by American Westerns than anything, right down to the horseback chases.
That approach isn’t entirely at odds with The Old Country. The grass is always greener somewhere else for Enzo, and that extends to his attitude towards America. New York City becomes another rung in the ladder of success, one that always feels like an unreachable pipe dream for Enzo the deeper he gets into the business. He plays the role of a cowboy just the same way he does that of a mafioso, unaware of the cultural challenges awaiting Italians on the other side of the Atlantic in the 1900s – a prevalent racism of the time that my father had to fight through to find stability in a new home.
The Old Country still does have enough Italian flavor to keep it authentic enough. Aside from the traditional music and period-appropriate cars, its primary bit of cultural inspiration comes in Sicilian knife fights. Whenever a confrontation gets personal, Enzo and his rival break out their switchblades and duel to the death. It’s a simple fighting minigame (slash, dodge, and parry) that never gets more complex after its introduction, but it lends to the feeling that the criminals of Sicily abide by a strict code. It may look and feel like the Old West at times, but there’s still honor among thieves here.
That’s important, because The Old Country’s intention isn’t to turn its nose up at Enzo and the peasants like him who chose this life. It always wants you to empathize with laborers who are backed into a corner. To some degree, Enzo’s story isn’t so far off from Antonio Ricco’s in Bicycle Thieves. Both are tragedies of necessity; economic dramas about men doing what they have to do to survive. For Antonio, it means stealing a bicycle. For Enzo, there’s quite a bit more blood involved. It’s all a fun escape until the walls start closing in and that glamorous life of crime becomes as suffocating as the mines Enzo was so desperate to escape from in the first place. Crime pays until it doesn’t. As sympathetic as it is to the economic realities of the era, The Old Country does not endorse organized crime as a lucrative alternative to manual labor. It posits that the mob is just another dangerous job where you answer to a different kind of boss.
It’s not just about the mafia, nor is it about Italy in the early 1900s. Mafia: The Old Country is a sobering reminder that tough times still create a breeding ground for exploitation today, just as they did in Sicily. When the money is tight and our backs are against the walls, our options narrow as survival becomes a necessity. There are plenty of ways that we end up carrying out someone else’s dirty work that don’t involve pulling a trigger at a don’s behest. The Old Country doesn’t expect you to agree with Enzo’s choices, but it does ask you to understand the societal forces that drove him to them.
Even if you’re not impressed by its boilerplate action, you may at least walk away better understanding why your dad is such a stronzo.
Mafia: The Old Country will be released August 8 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The game was reviewed on Switch 2 using a prerelease download code provided by 2K Games. Valnet Inc. has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Valnet Inc. may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
