


Gangster Trippin'ĭriving around the massive city of Lost Heaven, players will find the cops are a far tougher bunch than those in GTA. If you’d had the option to turn your passengers over to the authorities it might have been a different story -you’ll never know. You play a cab driver, who finds a couple of hoods jumping in the back of his cab demanding he drive off pronto, and in a matter of minutes, you’ve gone from cabbie to crook.

From the very beginning the game throws you into the murky world of organised crime. As was the case in Hidden & Dangerous, each of the 20 missions could feasibly have been, or be made into, a classic gangster movie. Molotov cocktails, shooting Tommy guns or clubbing innocent bystanders to death. The game - a very important and entertaining 50 per cent of the game." Vavra likes to describe Mafia as ft "fully playable classic gangster Inovie," offering a lot more scope than Fsimply driving fragile cars, throwing You can’t even i compare the indoor missions because GTA3 doesn’t have them, but in Mafia these make up at least 50 per cent of It has a deetf storyline about gangsters, on which all the missions are based. Yes the game is set in a huge city and involves plenty of driving, but whereas GTA is pure arcade, Mafia is a more realistic simulation. There are similar features, but when you play the game, you realise that these are only on the surface. "There are many parallels between GTA3 and us, but we haven’t been influenced by GTA and Mafia has been even longer in development than GTA3. "That’s fair enough," says the game’s lead designer Daniel Vavra. We managed to play through three near-complete missions when code I was dropped by the ZONE office recently, and to call the game a 1930s reworking of Grand Theft Auto wouldn’t be too far off the mark.

Perhaps the first big PC game of 2002 and one destined to have Godfather fans dusting off their violin cases and collecting their pinstripes from the cleaners, Mafia comes courtesy of Hidden & Dangerous creator Illusion Softworks.
