Mafia 3 Review: Is Lincoln Clay The Face of a New Video Game Generation?

Mafia 3 isn’t your typical open world sandbox game. Unlike Grand Theft Auto, you won’t find hundreds of side activities to do in between story missions and there isn’t a cast of quirky comedic characters to fuel YouTube clips and Twitter memes. Mafia 3 lacks some of the standard mechanics found in other open world games, but what it brings to the table is an amazing narrative coupled with unique, fun and engaging gameplay that would have only been watered down by the inclusion of tropes found in other games in the open world genre. STORY It’s been 12 years since C.J graced covers of Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas and in that time I can count on two hands other African Americans that have been a main character in a narratively driven game, and frankly two of those games starred 50 Cent. Luckily, Lincoln Clay, Mafia 3’s main character and protagonist is a well overdue and refreshing take on an African American videogame character.

It would have been easy for the developers and writers of Mafia 3 to emulate the 1960’s Black gangster stereotype seen in films like Harlem Nights, but instead they wrote Clay as a truly 3 dimensional character and it’s part of the reason the story of Mafia 3 is so engaging and why I found it difficult to put the controller down in my over 30 hours of gameplay. Mafia 3’s greatest asset is the perfect pacing in its storytelling. At its core Mafia 3 is a tale of revenge that advances as Clay systematically takes down the mob family that failed in kill…