'Mafia III' brings serious cultural issues to the 'Grand Theft Auto' formula

"Mafia III" is a game about race as much as it is a game about driving and shooting. After all, this is a game where you play as a black man in New Orleans in 1968.

Its developers have never shied away from this, which was encouraging on one hand and concerning on the other. It would have been very easy for them to mess this up, and mess it up big-time.

As a white guy, I can't tell you definitively whether or not they messed it up. I don't think they did, but it's not my place to say. Here are some great pieces of writing about this topic from people more qualified than I am:

- Polygon's review includes comments from a few non-white writers, with mixed reception of the game's handling of race.

- Vice Gaming's Austin Walker spoke to Charles Webb, the senior writer of the game, about its racial politics.

- In Paste's review, Terence Wiggins praises the game for its cathartic use of extreme violence against outwardly racist villains.

That last one is worth talking about. In case you weren't sure, this is a game where your main objective is to violently murder enemies who aren't shy about using the N-word when they see you.

Every player will have a different reaction to this. Some, like Wiggins, will find it cathartic, while others will find it a bit much. How you react to the way "Mafia III" approaches race might differ wildly depending on how (or even if) you experience racism in real life.

The only strong opinion I can give on this topic is I want to praise the developers for trying. They understood the politics inherent to the game's setting and never backed away from it. If nothing else, I think other game developers could stand to do the same.

You might be wondering what it's like to actually play "Mafia III." If you've played a "Grand Theft Auto" game, it's a lot like that.

You can roam around the city as you please, stealing cars and being a violent a-hole if that's your thing. The shooting is cover-based, and you can use stealth to silently dispatch enemies before they even know you're there.

The game's racial politics play into its mechanics, with an on-screen indicator for when a police officer is watching Lincoln, even when he's not even doing anything suspicious. There are even segregated businesses and delayed police response time in poor, black neighborhoods.

It's competent and inoffensive at worst, engaging and fascinating at best. The biggest variable is the mission design, which is uneven.

Instead of going from mission to mission like in "Grand Theft Auto," your job is to take down the criminal rackets in each district of New Bordeaux. There's some light variation depending on the nature of each racket, but essentially, you're going to different buildings or back alleys and killing everyone you find.

You do this until you've done enough damage to bring out the racket boss, who you then find and deal with. After you've cleared out all the rackets in a district, you take on the leader of said district in a more exciting, fleshed-out mission.

These missions are mostly great, ranging from a shootout on a sinking riverboat to going undercover as a boxer. Unfortunately, they make up a relatively small portion of what you're actually doing at any given moment.

Still, the blandest objectives tend to only take 5-10 minutes to complete. It gets repetitive, but I never found it especially tiresome, if that makes sense.

When you clear out a district, you call your three under-bosses to a sit-down meeting to discuss who gets to run the place. Your choices are:

- Burke, the leader of the Irish mob who has a penchant for cars and the devil's nectar.

- Cassandra, the leader of the Haitian mob who takes absolutely no guff from anyone.

- Vito, the leader of the Italian mob and the player character from "Mafia II."

When you assign a racket or district to one of these characters, you unlock special upgrades, such as the ability to buy certain weapons or bribe the police. However, the other two will get upset with you in response.

If you fail to evenly dole out territory to your buddies, the ones who feel spurned will disavow you and you'll have to do a special mission to kill them. The game acts like this will result in tough decisions, but evenly distributing districts and keeping everybody happy is remarkably easy.

This part of the game is disappointing. Vito, Burke and Cassandra are fun characters to be around, but aside from some boring, optional side missions, you don't actually see your under-bosses that often, making it difficult to care about their loyalty to you.

As you may have seen on the internet recently, "Mafia III" has plenty of hilarious glitches on display. I won't call it a mess, but it's a fairly buggy game.

I'm not going to devote too much energy to talking about this because, honestly, most of the bugs I encountered were goofy visual things. They didn't break the game at all.

The game did crash on me three times, though, two of those coming in the same part of the same side mission. The auto-save function is diligent enough that you'll never lose a lot of progress, but be warned that "Mafia III" has technical issues.

For as many complaints as I may have about the game's repetitive structure and technical problems, I found myself not caring so much about those things because New Bordeaux is such a wonderful world to be in.

Each district of New Bordeaux feels distinct, from the drunken revelry of the French Ward to the aristocratic pool parties of Frisco Fields. The environmental variety somewhat softens the repetition of the mission structure.

The game has no fast travel system, but I never wanted one. Driving in "Mafia III" feels outstanding, with the older, heavier cars kicking around corners in a super satisfying way.

Musically, it's full of era-appropriate hits you would expect, like Hendrix, Cash, Creedence and more. I don't even personally like some of those songs, and they've all been overused in media before, but their inclusion in this game worked for me.

If virtual tourism is something you're at all interested in, I think "Mafia III" does as good a job as any open-world action game of giving the player a fascinating world to mess around in.

Do I wish "Mafia III" had more mission variety? Sure! Do I wish the enemies were smarter, so stealth didn't feel like cheating? Absolutely!

On some level, I wish there was more to it than typical driving and shooting gameplay you find in any other open-world action game. The criminal empire building feels half-baked, and the side missions you can do to spend more time with your under-bosses are dull.

I can enjoy funny visual glitches, but I wish the game didn't crash. I even wish it was maybe 75% as long as it actually is.

Having said all that, I think "Mafia III" is worth seeing if you want to see a relatively major video game that engages with politics rather than dances around it. I can't stress enough how refreshing it is, even if it isn't perfect in that regard.

It also works as a pulp revenge tale, as it brings serious style that other games in the genre lack. There's some really strong writing scattered about, too.

I never found myself falling in love with "Mafia III" as an action game, but I feel that the setting, style and politics make it stand out among its contemporaries.