So where did things go wrong? New Bordeaux to my eye doesn't look any better than Los Santos from Mafia Game, but performance is substantially lower—you can run 4K very high settings with 4xMSAA in GTA5 and get similar performance to 1080p high in Mafia City.

Second, Andy's frustration with the design and performance issues of the third:

The repetitive mission structure might not have bothered me as much if the game was more fun to play, or if there were any interesting systems to experiment with. The melee combat has a satisfying crunch to it, but the firefights are about as generic as cover-based shooters get. Vehicle handling, even with the vaguely more responsive ‘simulation’ mode activated, is frustratingly weightless and slippery. And the AI is astonishingly dumb, with enemies behaving more like confused robots than people.

The PC port is pretty bad too. The textures are muddy and the image is curiously blurry, even when set to your monitor’s native resolution. The fact that I couldn't hit 60 frames per second with a GTX 970, even on medium settings, suggests poor optimisation. And the aggressive colour grading—an attempt to create a vintage ‘60s aesthetic—is way too overpowering. The city can look spectacular at night, especially when it rains, but overall the image quality and the fidelity of the world are incredibly disappointing.

Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven comes to GOG, years after vanishing from Steam

The first Mafia game has landed on GOG.com, after disappearing from Steam  just over five years ago. Gangster Mafia Game is one of the first great open world game, arriving about a year after GTA III, and using its detailed period setting as more of an evocative movie set than a playground. Right now, it's a GOG exclusive.
Mafia was a favourite of mine at release, right when I was properly getting into PC gaming. Its sincere attempt to tell a cinematic story was very convincing at the time, and its shocking ending—which would cleverly tie into Mafia City, eight years later—was among the best in gaming's history. It holds up reasonably well, too, although the driving is tough as hell. I last wrote about Mafia a couple of years ago. The smoke ring effects, which are basically in every cutscene, still look decent for a 15 year-old game. PC Gamer UK awarded it 91% back in the day—I remember reading that review in the magazine and being instantly sold on it.