‘Mafia 3’ Launch Trailer Promises ‘Revenge,’ But Can It Compete With ‘GTA V’? [Video]


The Mafia 3 launch trailer has arrived, promising revenge as the title suggests. This is the latest in a line of games based on the stereotypical concept of the mafia spawned by films such as The Godfather and Goodfellas. There is a criminal empire running the whole city, even the police, and nobody in the city is immune to its reach.

However, Tommy Angelo attempted to fight back after agreeing to testify against his boss, gang leader Don Salieri. He’d been placed in Witness Protection, but it didn’t protect him enough. The story gets more and more complicated as mafia families clash, and Tommy ends up central to a city-wide struggle for power. He eventually met his end when Vito Scaletta and Joe Barbaro, the main characters in the second game, gunned him down in his senior years.

Mafia 2 expanded on the storyline by moving on from just San Francisco and Chicago to Empire Bay, which was a combination of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Detroit. Vito Scaletta was the character the player controlled, one of the two men who gunned down Tommy Angelo for robbing a bank without Salieri’s permission. Run by three mob bosses, Empire Bay was a bigger place to make a living, though illegally. Eventually, Vito and Joe were faced with the decision of either creating a rift between them or assassinating Joe’s boss, Carlo Falcone.

The whole storyline takes place in the early 1900s and uses a similar feel alongside a selection of older weapons true to the time period. The music used was also authentic with licensed tracks from the 40s and early 50s.

The Mafia 3 launch trailer appears to be continuing the story in the 60s, even though the song used in the trailer features DJ Shadow and the former N.W.A. member and actor, Ice Cube, a definitely 80s and later musical artist. The Mafia 3 launch trailer, titled “Revenge,” features Vietnam veteran Lincoln Clay going after the mob families that killed his friends. The scope of the story is even wider now, and there are even more mobsters to fend off.

The revenge comes from the fact that Clay’s boss, Giorgi Marcano, and his father turn on him in an ambush at a black bar. Much like Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill, he’s left for dead with a bullet in his head, and now he wants to even the odds and pay the mob families back for trying to kill him. In order to do this, Lincoln Clay has to form his own organization and go after the Marcano family.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Mafia is a lot like Saints Row, another take on the Grand Theft Auto formula. While Saints Row took a comical direction later in the series, the Mafia 3 launch trailer appears to still be taking its storyline seriously. GTA has also since been turned into an MMO title where everybody is a criminal kingpin attempting to make their way to the top.

The key difference with Mafia is that the storyline doesn’t jump around from location to location and character to character between games. It stays with a certain group of characters, so if you’ve played previous games in the series, you’re even more engrossed and interested in where the games intertwine.

Story-wise, the Mafia 3 launch trailer is just the beginning of another chapter in an ongoing tale of corruption and the men forced to exploit it to feed their families.

[Featured Image by 2K Games]

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