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At one point I stood on the hood of a station wagon in full view of several officers, throwing punches at the air to no reaction. So while the cops may call you "boy" or "kid", they won't take umbrage when you careen along a street in your muscle car, side-swiping convertibles and knocking over traffic lights - anything short of pulling a gun or running somebody down is perfectly above board. This is a power fantasy at heart, a framework built to entertain rather than tap-dance across cultural fault lines or dig into the experience of discrimination. The driving is an improvement on previous Mafia games - vehicles wallow into corners with satisfying heft, and off-road racing changes the handling noticeably. The key problem is that the game has inherited its open-world design and mission structure from Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto: a soup of by-the-numbers fetchquests, outpost infiltration sequences and firefights that depends, above all, on the player enjoying more or less total freedom of movement and freedom from consequence. If prejudice is everywhere in the world of Mafia 3, however, it's also seldom that impactful, beyond the engagingly acted cutscenes and wealth of incidental writing. There's even room for a little social comedy - the radio ad for the Royal Hotel in Downtown New Bordeaux, for example, voiced in plummy English with the British national anthem heaped on top for good measure. The script's ethnic slurs aren't deposited with a guilty flourish, as in many a "socially conscious" blockbuster, but are simply part of how characters of the era speak, a complex set of overlapping registers. The portrayal of social division isn't binary and overt, but intricate, entrenched and unresolved, bursting forth at every level of the representation. It's a virtual city that is founded on prejudice - a setting that, for all its numbskull pedestrian behaviours and low-resolution assets, often genuinely looks and sounds like the product of decades of ethnic struggle and systematised abuse. This isn't just a virtual city with a point to make about prejudice. Certain shopkeepers will call the authorities if you linger too long in the aisles. Police officers will pivot to eyeball you as you pass, muttering under their breath. White NPCs may not take kindly to Lincoln's presence in certain areas, it goes without saying.

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While primitive in raw technical terms and carpeted with bugs and blemishes, New Bordeaux can be an arresting backdrop.Ĭar radio stations run the gamut of innuendo and opinion, from starchy country and western DJs who witter on about the evils of pot and free love, to legalisation activists who hold forth on the covert bigotry of the war on drugs. Enter a jazz bar in the French Ward, with its faded wooden shutters and background simmer of stripclub music, and you might overhear an evangelical diatribe about interracial marriage. Opt for a stroll along the riverfront after clobbering a snitch, and you may stumble across a group of black dockworkers debating the merits of non-violent protest. Racism, intolerance and disaffection of all kinds are everywhere in Hangar 13's New Bordeaux, threaded into the emergent dialogue and art to an unprecedented degree. This may sound melodramatic, an attempt to force my own political conscience on the game - but Mafia 3's greatest achievement, I think, is that it creates and sustains a space for such musings.

I'm not sure what the game's African-American lead Lincoln Clay made of this - the result, it seems, of a glitch whereby reflections lag a few seconds behind the action - but in that plump, affable spectre I belatedly recognised myself: another in a long line of privileged, complacent white guys, lurking in the background with his hands on the levers and buttons of the world. Availability: Out now on PS4, Xbox One and PCĪnd then there was that time I peered into a prostitute's dressing mirror during a raid on a rival gang's brothel and saw a corpulent, buck-naked white man, trapped like a frozen chicken in a purgatory of PS2-grade pixels.
