For the Mafia game succeeds in immersing the player in the Mafia underworld like few experiences ever have before. Seeing Vito transform from a downtrodden kid into a Mafia enforcer into a cocaine middleman is shocking, but what is even more so is that fact that as he is doing so, it feels 'OK'. The police transform from being the 'nuisance' they are in other open-world games into being a genuine enemy. You don't feel like the bad guy- your allies aren't comically evil after all- and this draws the player in, perhaps in a way perhaps not too dissimilar from how young people really did join the Mafia all those years ago.

Moments of shock- the killing of an optimistic and promising protege, or the slaughter of a whistleblower, make one reconsider one's actions, but a few hours later these fade away into another beautiful Empire Bay sunset, shoved into the back of the player's mind and forgotten, in the same way that the protagonist might do so.

Vito isn't a cardboard villain, but a character that the player becomes deeply sympathetic to, a character that is deeply apathetic to everything but his friends. Vito seems to care little for the 'life', never showing much interest in his friend's passion for expensive alcohol, cars and women. When his friends ask him why he does what he does, Vito's answers make him sound more and more as if he pretends to like the 'Mafia lifestyle' just to get his friends to shut up. Rather than being a hero, Vito seems like you or I (probably are). Someone with ambition perhaps, but little of the drive to achieve all their goals. Someone who just wants to get by.

Even that, however, isn't Mafia City's greatest strength.

Despite the almost complete lack of choice in the storyline, Vito felt more like a character I could sympathise with after 15 hours of Mafia City, than Shepard did after 90 hours of Mass Effect, or Drake did after 40 hours of Uncharted. He felt human in a way few other characters have, and the writers of the game deserve credit for that alone.