Mafia: Definitive Edition is more than just a lick of paint

Mafia: Definitive Edition looks a bit nice. The remake of the 2002 open world crime 'em up was announced with an extremely brief trailer a few weeks ago, but it was unclear exactly how remade it would be. A new trailer today makes clear that the answer is: a lot. It's a ground-up recreation, and the screenshot above gives a sense of the graphical upgrade.

Here's the trailer:

Chatter with Hangar 13 during today's PC Gaming Show mentioned that the story was mostly the same as before, charting Tommy Angelo's rise up through a crime family and eventual escape. Lots of the rest of it has been tweaked and modernised, from city streets that are newly busy with pedestrians to cars that take advantage of modern advances in wobbling more when it's rainy out.

I loved the original game back in 2002, and it was on every top ten list I made for 5-10 years afterwards. It's aged poorly though, worse than less ambitious games from the era, and the original is a difficult game to go back to now. The streets are largely barren, the same handful of voice lines repeat over and over again, and it's generally got "this had to fit onto a CD" written all over it. John found the same when he returned to Mafia a couple of weeks ago.

This is a story trailer and so it's still unclear how elements like the shooting and mission structure have been modernised, but I'm properly excited to find out.

Mafia: Definitive Edition is targeting an August 28th release date on Steam, and buying it as part of the Mafia Trilogy gets you instant access to smaller Definitive Edition updates for Mafia 2 and 3.

Whatever you call it, hit our E3 2020 tag for more from this summer's blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check out the PC games at the PlayStation 5 show, everything at the PC Gaming Show, and all the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.