I have to admit, Mafia 3 wasn’t a game that got me too excited. I played Mafia 2 and it was fine but nothing particularly memorable about it and I expected the same from Mafia 3. I expect to be amazed by the story of games like Dragon Age and Fallout. I expect to meet likable characters that I really start to feel for the more I play in games like those. I don’t expect either of those from shooters such as Mafia 3. But this game surprised me in the best possible way. I’ve yet to find another game that offers the catharsis that ridding the city of the Dixie Mafia provides.
And I’ll add this: They truly couldn’t have picked a better time in the US to release this game.
For anyone not familiar with the premise of Mafia 3, you play as Lincoln Clay, a Vietnam vet that recently returned home from the war in a fictional 1968 New Orleans. In short, you spend your time in the game seeking vengeance for the deaths of your family members. You build your own mob, complete with underbosses that you have to keep happy, and like many other open world games, you do so by completing side missions. The main story missions are absolutely fantastic and they give you characters that are easy to root for, even though they may not be great people, and they give you characters that you very happily feed to the alligators.
Alright, on to how it stacks up accessibility wise:
It does about as well as we’ve come to expect from big games like this. It doesn’t leave you yelling “This is the most wonderful accessible game ever!” but it also doesn’t make you mad you spent your money on it. It’s captioned for the most part, all important instances of dialogue are captioned and some of the random chatter you encounter out on the streets. And the captions are fairly easy to read, put against a darkened text box, although at times there is too much text on the screen.
On screen instructions (press X to pick stuff up, B to melee attack, etc.) are clear and easy to see and the objective markers are mostly helpful in guiding you throughout the city, save for the times it’s a white parker shown against a bright background, but in those instances, the minimap is helpful if you’re in your car.
All in all, Mafia 3 is a good game accessibility-wise and an amazing game story-wise. The story it tells isn’t one that should be missed.
Bottom Line
Mafia 3 tells an important story and won’t disappoint with its accessibility. Definitely a game worth buying.