Short, smart, potentially a gamble: with Mafia: The Old Country, Take-Two grapples with the past and future of video games

Place and pacing are what Mafia: The Old Country does best. The artists and programmers astatine Hangar 13 person crafted an evocative and unflinching rendering of Sicily astatine the crook of the twentieth century: dappled citrus groves; vineyards snaking down steep hills; mines filled with indentured slaves, each look and effect vessel lit with the exquisite, high-drama flair of a Caravaggio painting. The scriptwriters and communicative designers person kept up their extremity of the bargain, producing an ebbing, flowing mob communicative which puts arsenic overmuch accent connected quietness arsenic cracking skulls. Place and pacing are symbiotic: it's done languorous car drives and trotting equine rides that we travel to admit the setting. In astir each chapter, the volcanic Mount Etna smokes ominously successful the distance, the skybox wielded arsenic a cleanable ocular metaphor for the unit bubbling conscionable beneath the aboveground of this picturesque island.

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