Hello everyone and welcome to my platinum review of Mafia Definitive Edition!

In this article I will give you my thoughts about the game, go over the roadmap to platinum trophy and talk about the trophy list to hopefully help you decide if you want to go ahead and earn a platinum trophy in this amazing game. As a bonus I will also give you a couple of my tips on beating the race mission, so stay tuned!

Now, without further ado, let’s dive right in!

My Thoughts about the Game

This game is a remake of the original Mafia that came out in 2002. Now I personally played it a lot when it came out and finished it countless times, so I will try to do my best to be as subjective as I can be, and not look at it through nostalgia glasses.

The game takes place in the 1930s, the era of prohibition and the great depression in US. Times are hard for a lot of people and unemployment is skyrocketing. Our main protagonist is Tommy Angelo, a cab driver, that because of circumstances and personal choices found himself as a member of an organized crime organization.

The story is a retelling of the original game with some minor tweaks. Some of them I actually really liked, for example, character like Sarah who got a lot more development, but others not as much. Overall, it is a retelling of one of the best noir stories in video game history, so even though it has some flaws I didn’t mind them too much.

The game is an open world, although the missions are pretty linear. There is a free-roam you can engage in and explore outside the missions. The city looks great and believable, but that being said, there is not a lot to do in the city outside of finding collectibles and a couple of missions and secrets, so you probably won’t find yourself messing around in it for hours on end.

Unfortunately, PS4 or PS5 for that matter is not the best platform to experience this game, since it has a lot of texture popping and the draw distance is relatively short, probably because of the hardware limitations. Even on PS4 Pro I had some framerate dips while playing in 1080p. On PS5 the performance is great, but it is still a PS4 version so it looks the same. That being said the game still look impressive and I didn’t mind those issues too much.

All in all, the game is fun, the story is engaging and despite the fact that Mafia is lacking in things to do in the open world, it is a great experience, so I would recommend playing it, especially because it’s not a full price release.

Roadmap & Trophy List

If you want to go for a platinum trophy in this game you will have to finish it on the highest difficulty, classic. You have to be very careful not to change the difficulty at all until you finish the game, because doing so will void the trophy and you will have to complete it all over again.

Classic difficulty is relatively challenging in the shooting sections, but if you are careful, pay attention to audio cues and the enemies on the minimap you will be able to beat it. You absolutely have to listen to enemies throwing Molotov cocktails at you. When you hear them say it change your cover immediately, otherwise you will probably die right away. Also, when you reload your weapons, you lose the bullets left in the clip. The exception to this rule is the shotguns, but you will have to change your mindset of reloading after every shot because you will run out of bullets very quickly if you do so. I almost never reloaded manually on my playthrough. Personally, I wasn’t struggling too much with shooting sections, but keep in mind that I have a reasonable amount of experience with those type of games at this point.

Now, because on classic you are locked to simulation driving mode, car handling it is pretty challenging. Vehicles have a lot of weight and inertia and you can lose control really quickly. That makes the chase sequences the hardest part of the game. While we are still on the topic of driving, I have to acknowledge the infamous race mission. This mission on classic difficulty is definitely the hardest part of this game and will probably make or break your platinum ambitions. You have to finish it first and there are no glitches or exploits, at least at the time of the filming. It was actually the reason I gave up on this game for 6 months because I was trying to beat it for 2 hours straight and I just couldn’t do. When I went back to Mafia half a year later, I actually beat it in half an hour. A couple of tips I can give you are:

• Go slow on turns.
• Learn the track.
• If you use the X button on turns you can do a power slide. Discovering that was a real game changer for me.
• Be patient and take breaks when you need them. Sometimes just taking a break for a couple of hours can make a huge difference.

I would definitely recommend checking out a video guide by OverHyped Gamer who did a full breakthrough of the best way to approach every single turn.

And while you at it you can also check out my playthrough of this race.

Another issue on Classic is the police, because you are locked to simulation there as well. On simulation police will react to you breaking the speed limit and to traffic accidents, which can be annoying, but honestly, I didn’t mind that too much. Most of the time you can skip the drive if you enable that in settings, so that is not an issue. I actually didn’t mind driving slowly, enjoying the scenery and listening to dialogue. What makes it even better, for minor infractions the police will just give you a fine, and because Mafia doesn’t have any in-game currency system it just costs you 30 seconds of your time.

There are 162 collectibles in the game in form of magazines, cigarette cards and mystery foxes. Some of them can only be found in story missions, but nothing is missable because of chapter select. That being said 162 collectibles is pretty rough and finding all of them, even with a guide took me a couple of hours, so keep that in mind. I found the collectibles to be very generic and apart from getting a trophy there is no reason for collecting them at all. The covers on the magazines and cards do look cool, but I don’t think they really worth your time.

Among the other thing you will need to do is to find and drive 30 different cars. Doing that will add them to your garage. This is not that hard at all, since you will unlock around 15 of them throughout the campaign and 5 more from finding secret cars, which you will need to do anyway. Others you can just find while free-roaming and doing telephone missions.

Last but not least, there are a couple of miscellaneous trophies but they are honestly easy enough, so no need to worry about them. The only trophy you might want to keep an eye out for is “Not Classy” and it’s just after the race mission, but even if you missed it there is a chapter select, so it’s not like you will have to replay the whole game.

Conclusions

Now for the main question, should you go for a platinum trophy in this game?

I believe that this is not for everyone, because beating it on classic difficulty can be challenging and even frustrating at times. If you don’t mind the highest difficulty playthrough, which is mostly reasonable, except for the race, and the sheer number of collectibles doesn’t put you off, you could probably go for it. If you are a fan of the original game, like me, you can try it as well, although it can be a bit of a hit and miss for you because of the story changes.

For me this platinum journey was mostly pleasant experience, except for a few parts.

Thank you for reading!