My mad sprint to play and end as many 2025 video games earlier than finalizing my end-of-the-year listing continued over the weekend. In order that’s why, months after it launched and we reviewed it, I began after which completed Mafia: The Old Country on Sunday. And people, I miss when AAA video games weren’t all live-service-infected open-world action-RPG grinds.
In August, 2K and Hangar 13’s newest Mafia sport, The Previous Nation, launched on consoles and PC. A prequel to the whole sequence set within the early 1900s, this entry is generally its personal self-contained story with small gestures towards the remainder of the Mafia-verse. This time round, you play as Enzo, a younger man who escapes a horrible life as a slave in a big sulfur mine in Italy. Enzo lands within the lap of a neighborhood mafia household, and over the course of about 10 hours, relying on how briskly you play, he goes from a no person to a made man and trusted soldier in Don Torrisi’s felony group, all whereas hiding a relationship with the Don’s daughter. And people, I had a blast with The Old Country.
I’m not right here to assessment it, as we have already got a assessment of The Previous Nation up on the location. As a substitute, I’m right here to publicly ask builders and publishers to make extra of those sorts of video games. Bear in mind when studios used to spend some huge cash making thrilling 8 to 12-hour campaigns that featured a number of cool moments and set items?
This was so widespread within the PS2 period and even into the Xbox 360 period; we’d get loads of single-player, linear video games that weren’t overstuffed open worlds coated in seasonal content material, battle passes, or reside occasions, and which didn’t take 200 hours to complete. For a very long time, we acquired so many video games like The Previous Nation, video games that featured large budgets and spectacular visuals, offered an thrilling weekend of enjoyable and, perhaps, supplied some collectibles and secrets and techniques to seek out on a replay. Did these video games reinvent the wheel or supply extremely new and distinctive gameplay mechanics? No. And neither does The Previous Nation. It’s a cover-based shooter with stable third-person stealth gameplay, some car segments, and loads of considerably novel one-on-one knife fights.
And sure, I find out about indie video games. I cowl them weekly at Kotaku and play lots of them in my spare time. Quite a lot of them are shorter experiences which might be laser-focused on delivering a linear expertise. That’s nice. But it surely’s not merely that The Previous Nation is “short” in comparison with one thing like Assassin’s Creed Shadows. It’s additionally that it nonetheless seems to be and performs like an enormous AAA online game; it simply doesn’t demand you spend 12 hours crafting swords and finishing checklists. You get all of the cinematic set items and high-end cutscenes that fashionable AAA video games typically characteristic, but it surely’s all offered in a tidy little bundle you may end with out devoting a number of weeks of your life to it. It’s so good. So refreshing. And it’s one thing I really miss in 2025.
The Old Country has seemingly sold very well for 2K Games, and that makes me hopeful that the workforce at Hangar 13 will have the ability to construct one other sport like this, be it one thing new or a Mafia sequel. As a result of I like large video games like this that showcase how highly effective fashionable consoles are and look nice on an enormous 4K TV. I’m simply bored with having to spend 70+ hours in every of those video games to complete them.
Mafia: The Previous Nation is a implausible reminder that video games don’t must take six years to develop, that smaller, extra targeted video games can nonetheless be “AAA” and might nonetheless achieve success, too. An excellent lesson for publishers to be aware of as we transfer into 2026.
