Technologies

Mafia: The Old Country Is a Restrictive Crime Drama That Falls Short

The Mafia comeback? Fuggedaboudit.

Mafia: The Old Country, from developer Hangar 13, is the fourth entry in the Mafia franchise, which started in 2002. The open-world game series, mainly focusing on the Italian mafia’s organized criminal activities in fictional US cities, came out less than a year after Grand Theft Auto III, which firmly established the open-world style of gaming.

While the Mafia games didn’t have the mayhem of GTA, what they offered instead was a compelling storyline that kept you glued to your controller. Mafia: The Old Country, however, doesn’t have that or much else, as the game lacks so much of the substance in its big, open world that made previous games so rich and enjoyable.

In The Old Country, players step into the role of Enzo, a young man who was sold to a sulfur mine in Sicily by his father to pay off his debts in 1904. Establishing the game in Italy is a departure for the series, which had previously followed mob classics like The Godfather in setting its stories in America with the fictional cities Lost Haven and Empire Bay as stand-ins for Chicago and New York City. It’s a promising start, but the game’s smaller scale — its $50 pricetag suggests a more limited scope than the $70 and even $80 AAA games launching these days — becomes apparent as the game progresses.

After a collapse of the mine nearly cost him his life, Enzo escapes to a nearby vineyard owned by Don Torrisi, one of the heads of the local mafia families. The Don takes in Enzo, not because he has a compassionate heart, but the need for muscle: men from a rival family have been trespassing on his land, showing a lack of respect.

Enzo starts off as one of the hired hands on the vineyard but falls deeper into the criminal underworld as the Don gives him more and more important tasks. Each chapter plays out a certain important event over the course of four years as Enzo becomes part of the Torrisi family. There is even an initiation ceremony into the family that is similar to the one depicted in other mafia films and shows like The Sopranos.

The Old Country is intended to be somewhat accurate to the time period, but not so realistic that it drags down the fun. In every chapter, Enzo has to complete some tasks that usually involve a bit of driving or riding a horse somewhere, a stealth sequence, some sort of firefight, and a very dramatic knife fight that becomes formulaic. Ultimately, the game feels just so restrictive in its reliance on scripted story beats that abandon the freeform nature of earlier Mafia games.

More scripted than The Godfather Trilogy

One of my biggest gripes about Mafia: The Old Country is how scripted it is. There is just no semblance of freedom within the game, dictating specific experiences with the illusion of chance and randomness.

For example, over the course of the game, Enzo has to compete in two races: one with a horse and the other in a car. In both cases, I screwed up early on in the competition and lagged far behind, but I progressed against the other racers with some sharp turns and not-so-legal tactics like bumping my horse into other riders. Thing is, once I passed another racer, it seemed like the game went ahead and stopped having that racer try, so I didn’t really need much reason to check my tail to see if the guy I passed up was going to catch up to me because they seemed to just stop bothering.

The same goes for the enemies in shootouts. They get behind some cover, and some will, for whatever reason, just walk right to you while shooting. There is no sense of urgency or concern when they get shot; they’re just scripted to move forward. It’s just constant through missions, where once you reach a certain point, the sequence changes on a dime with no hint of a natural transition from playing stealthy to having a firefight.

Where this was really baffling was in the areas of San Celeste where the townspeople gathered. If you’re thinking about doing some typical GTA-like mayhem, well, you can forget about it. In these areas, you can’t pull a gun, which is fine, but on the outskirts of these areas, you can. There is a bit of a failsafe that you can’t shoot at the people, although some may react when you pull a gun out and point it at them. You can, however, throw a grenade, and the grenade doesn’t do a damn thing. No injuries, no one running around, no reaction, nothing. The townspeople just stick to their script, and that’s it.

It’s just a shame how closed off this game feels. You have all the tools to really have some fun and engage with the fantasy of being a criminal in a nearly lawless land, and the developers did pretty much everything possible to make sure you don’t go off-script.

Whacked by the frame rate

The presentation for The Old Country has its share of issues for me. To start, I was provided with a PC code, which isn’t my preferred platform to game on, and for the exact issue I came across.

My desktop isn’t top of the line with its GeForce RTX 3060 and Ryzen 5 3600, but it handles the newest games fine enough, and for whatever reason, I was getting constant slowdown going in and out of sequences. When I first booted up the game, it automatically set my graphics settings between mid and high, which is typical for most games, and I dealt with laggy transitions from an action sequence into a cutscene and vice versa. The Old Country does require a fair amount of power, but I never had my PC chug along this much for a new game, which makes me hope that this will be fixed in a day-one optimization patch.

Another issue in the presentation was the sound editing. The voice actors did a great job in bringing their characters to life. In particular, Don Torrisi, played by Jonny Santiago, was just a thrill. As soon as Torrisi was introduced, I already felt that charisma that someone who runs a crime family would have, and when he gets pissed, you can feel it in your bones.

However, in between some fine voice acting, there were some noticeable moments when I could tell that the sound editing didn’t give that natural spacing you’d expect when two people are talking. There were also moments when you could hear that maybe they didn’t use the best take of the line reading.

The graphics are, for a lack of a better word, fine. The character models were detailed, but not to an exceptional degree. The same could be said for the part of Sicily the game takes place. I just didn’t see that one spot that had me wanting to stop everything and take a look at the land around, which is a shame given the shift from American cities to the sprawling Italian countryside.

Another bright spot was the score. It was filled with different pieces that felt authentic for the time period — symphonic strings and other classical Italian fare — yet also dramatic and really added to those tense moments.

He pulls a knife, you pull a knife, that’s the San Celeste way

Combat in Mafia, for the most part, is fairly standard for a third-person open-world action game that takes place in the early 1900s. It’s a lot of shooting with revolvers, shotguns and rifles, with them having different stopping power, ammo capacity and accuracy. What’s unique in this game is the knives.

The array of blades available to the player is quite extensive, more so than the guns, and they play a big part in the game beyond combat. During the stealth sequences, Enzo uses a knife to immediately kill enemies instead of mashing a button to choke them out. There is a group of knives that he can throw to take out enemies from a distance. The blade can lose its sharpness as it’s being used to open locks on doors and lockboxes, as well as killing people, so there are some knives with increased durability, which can be reset whenever you pick up a whetstone that enemies will just happen to have on them.

Where the knife really comes into play are the one-on-one fights. These tend to be duels that close out a whole combat sequence and, toward the end of the game, involve more prominent characters. These fights are dramatic but nothing exceptional, satisfying a story beat but not thrilling in gameplay.

For these dramatic encounters, Enzo and his enemy have their own life bar and need to slice each other up with slashes, a thrust attack to reach farther-away enemies, a power attack to break through the defenses of a blocking enemy, and a dodge and parry. If you haven’t figured it out yet, this is just paper-rock-scissors, but you know, with knives — which is fine if predictable. There are no quicktime events during the fights, just occasional breaks where Enzo and his opponent tussle around some more before it goes back into duel mode. It’s all, once again, by the script, and while they can be quite dramatic, it’s simply not particularly special. Maybe there were a lot of knife fights in the early days of the mafia, I have no idea, I’m not a mafia historian, but this feels like it was intended to give the combat some flair. The game takes place in the 1900s, so there are no machine guns, rocket launchers or flamethrowers, and the developers thought that giving these very dramatic sequences could help add to both the historical realism of the time while keeping it exciting.

If that’s the case, that notion is The Old Country’s shortcoming. I have this beautiful landscape that is not really available to explore until you complete the game and unlock Explore mode. Once I do some venturing, I find there’s not much to see, and in some cases, the architecture makes no sense, with stairways going up to just brick walls. I meet these interesting characters who I’d like to know more about and would be willing to spend time with, but I can’t and will only see them when they’re allowed during missions.

It could be that my decades of playing open-world games since GTA III came out are leading me to expect so much more from an open-world game. Mafia is not GTA, and The Old Country does keep to the linear style of the first two games, but it’s just so limiting. While I wasn’t hoping for an RPG, a little more freedom would keep me from feeling railroaded into a single story. At least in the first Mafia game, I can get fined for speeding, while in this game, I can speed through the countryside without a worry.

I would have liked to see Mafia: The Old Country give me more to sink my teeth into. This is not about length, which comes in at around 12 to 15 hours to complete, but more about having some meat on the bone. If it’s about giving me a cinematic drama to play before me, then really give it to me instead of a very typical love story up until the last hour or so. My hopes were high for Mafia: The Old Country, and the game didn’t satisfy.

Mafia: The Old Country comes out Friday on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S for $50.

Technologies

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emerges as Trump’s top ally in AI safety debate

Jensen Huang’s position as the leader of the world’s most valuable company, has earned him Trump’s ear on the most important topics in AI.

With the debate about regulating artificial intelligence raging in Washington this week, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his top ally on the subject: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” Trump told Huang, who’d put the president on speaker while on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. Trump repeated a point he’d made on social media: that mounting AI and data center concerns are a “hoax.”

While other tech leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have cozied up to Trump during his second term, experts told CNBC that Huang is exercising outsized influence in the White House. He’s slated to attend Trump’s high-profile state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.

Nvidia has been powering the AI boom since before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, supplying the graphics processing units used by OpenAI, Anthropic and others to train their models and run large workloads. Revenue surged to $215 billion in the latest fiscal year, up from $17 billion in 2021.

Huang’s position as the leader of the world’s most valuable company and the chipmaker at the heart of the AI boom has earned him the president’s ear on the most important AI topics.

“Trump just likes winners, and Jensen’s very good at speaking his language,” Samuel Hammond, director of AI policy at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, said in an interview.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment, and White House representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Whether joining Trump for a candlelit dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, or closing a keynote by thanking guests for “making America great again,” Huang has learned how to appeal to the president. Trump and Huang have appeared together at least six times in public since the start of the second term, including trips to Saudi Arabia and the U.K., and a recent trip to China via Air Force One.

Huang is pushing for U.S. AI to move faster while some of Nvidia’s most important customers — namely OpenAI and Anthropic — are ramping up pressure on governments to regulate the technology as fears spread about its potential dangers.

An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, said he quit his job earlier this month because he feared top AI labs are “gambling with our lives.” Coxon’s resignation set off a firestorm on social media, prompting calls for increased oversight from more than 20 members of Congress.

Concerns were already swirling after OpenAI disclosed a significant security incident in July, when two of its models escaped containment, accessed the open internet, and breached the online AI repository Hugging Face to get a better score on a benchmark test.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited that episode in a bombshell essay a week ago, urging AI developers to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced AI models. Amodei encouraged companies to cooperate directly with the U.S. government, and reiterated his desire for “well-considered regulation of AI.”

Amodei’s “pacing” proposal was endorsed by other industry leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis, who agreed on the need for a slowdown and additional oversight.

‘Did no harm’

Huang took a different position.

In public appearances over the past week, the Nvidia CEO brushed off concerns about AI’s risks. He said that predictions of doom aren’t grounded in science, and that model developers are responsible for securing their products before releasing them.

The solution to safety concerns, Huang said in Scotland on Thursday, is “good old-fashioned engineering.”

“There were incidents, and those incidents, thankfully, did no harm,” Huang said.

Huang’s position is largely shared publicly by David Sacks, a venture capitalist who previously served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar. Sacks co-hosts the “All-In” Podcast, which produced Monday’s event that featured the Trump-Huang call.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on the same day as the summit.

Before the recent uproar over safety, Nvidia focused its Washington outreach on export controls.

Last year, Nvidia was pushing to sell its AI chips to restricted countries, including China, drawing sharp criticism from U.S. lawmakers.

Some members of Congress, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have cautioned that selling Nvidia hardware to China could threaten U.S. national security and narrow America’s lead in AI.

In December, Huang’s strategy paid off. Trump announced that Nvidia was granted permission to ship its H200 chip to Chinese customers, and that the U.S. would collect a 25% fee in exchange.

The H200 announcement drew intense pushback from both sides of the aisle. Huang declined an invitation from Warren to testify before the Senate Banking Committee in June. The following month, a top U.S. trade official confirmed that H200 sales to China were underway.

Profit motive

Nvidia and Huang argued that banning Nvidia exports to China would be against American interests, in part because such a move would spur the world’s second-largest economy and computing market to develop its own cutting-edge AI chips. The H200 is no longer Nvidia’s most powerful chip, as it has shipped two generations of its newer Blackwell processors in the U.S.

But Nvidia’s fate wasn’t entirely up to U.S. lawmakers, as China’s regulators mostly blocked imports of the H200 chips.

Nvidia’s clear profit motive leads some experts to say it takes the concerns expressed by model developers more seriously than those of the chipmaker, because the labs are the ones responsible for the actual AI technology.

“Nvidia is the most aggressive in terms of, let’s just make money,” said Andrew Yoon, a researcher at CivAI, a nonprofit warning about the dangers of AI. “At every turn, they are really trying to just make sure whatever happens is good for Nvidia’s bottom line.”

Nvidia’s ambitions in China will loom large during the state dinner on Thursday, when Trump, Huang and Xi will all be in the same room. The White House is also planning a meeting with major AI executives to coincide with the event, according to CNN. Other industry executives, including Altman, are expected to attend.

But Huang’s presence carries extra weight. During a House hearing on Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked if Trump understands the threat AI presents.

“I would just say the president is completely aligned with Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia,” Bessent said.

WATCH: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says safety is an engineering problem

Technologies

Iranian President Pezeshkian to travel to New York for UN summit as Trump threatens consequences of no agreement

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is set to attend the UN General Assembly in New York as diplomatic hopes rise, even as U.S. President Donald Trump warns of severe consequences if no deal is reached.

President Masoud Pezeshkian is set to lead an Iranian delegation at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, as fresh optimism emerges for a diplomatic resolution to the Middle East conflict.

According to the semi-official Tasnim news agency, Pezeshkian will deliver a speech before the assembly, outlining Iran’s stance on “international developments,” with special attention to its conflict with the U.S. and Israel.

He is also expected to meet with several world leaders on the margins of the gathering, which runs from Sept. 22 to 26, and Sept. 28.

The Iranian delegation’s participation at the UN has sparked renewed optimism for a diplomatic path out of the war, boosting market sentiment on Monday — equities climbed, oil prices softened, and global bond yields dropped sharply.

However, U.S. President Donald Trump — who has indicated willingness to meet Pezeshkian during the assembly — has warned that Iran’s economy would be devastated or its leadership eliminated if Tehran fails to reach an agreement.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, Trump said the only choices available were “wiping Iran out,” or allowing its economy to “rot,” unless a deal is reached.

Meanwhile, Iran’s military said its intelligence pointed to a new, large-scale strike being orchestrated by the U.S. and its allies, cautioning of “painful” retaliation throughout the Middle East. Any regional nations supporting such an attack would be considered participants in the conflict, it added.

“If the U.S. commits any error against the Islamic Republic of Iran, all its positions and interests in the region will face sustained, effective and painful strikes,” the Khatam al-Anbia Central Headquarters of Iran stated, per Tasnim.

Houthi-Saudi conflict complicates diplomacy hopes

The U.S. State Department issued a security alert over the weekend, warning of potential unforeseen escalation in the Middle East and urging Americans to stay vigilant and prepare for possible flight cancellations and airspace closures.

The alerts followed claims by Iran-backed Houthi militants of missile and drone strikes on Riyadh on Saturday, which triggered the first air-raid warning in the Saudi capital since hostilities intensified in July.

Saudi officials reported that a ballistic missile was intercepted and destroyed, with no casualties or damage. The Houthis also tried to strike civilians and infrastructure across multiple areas of the kingdom, according to Saudi-led coalition spokesperson Major-General Turki al-Maliki, who posted on X on Saturday that those attempts were repelled by the country’s air defenses.

Despite widening hostilities, oil prices have retreated in recent days as traders anticipate a recovery in energy shipments from oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

Oil prices will stay elevated despite U.S. advances in moving oil through the Strait of Hormuz, a team of analysts at Eurasia Group noted in a Saturday report. Any increase in oil flows would be insufficient to close the overall market deficit, they said, projecting Brent prices to trade in a higher range of $90-110 per barrel for the remainder of this year.

“Iran’s leadership will stick with resistance, even as they quarrel internally,” the consultancy firm stated, noting that Tehran aims to use military proxies and tanker attacks to maintain a chokehold on shipping flows and pressure Washington into concessions.

Tehran has maintained it will not reopen the Strait of Hormuz until Washington honors its commitments under the June memorandum, which called for lifting the naval blockade of Iranian ports, easing sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets, and ending U.S. military threats.

Iranian parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Sunday that Iran must continue both fighting and negotiating to push back its adversaries, and only pursue diplomacy when it holds the advantage on the battlefield.

Technologies

Oil prices drop below $100 per barrel as Trump shows willingness to engage with Iran

Oil prices fell below $100 per barrel as Trump expressed openness to diplomacy with Iran, amid ongoing regional tensions and attacks.

On Monday, crude oil prices saw a sharp decline, trading below $100 per barrel, after President Donald Trump reportedly opted against bombing Yemen for the time being and signaled openness to diplomacy with Iran. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures decreased by 5.4% to $94.85 per barrel by 10:48 a.m. ET. Brent crude, the international benchmark, experienced a fall of 4.1% to $99.61 per barrel. Oil prices have declined for four consecutive sessions as the market retreats from the recent rally. Trump informed Fox News that he might be willing to meet with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian during this week’s UN General Assembly. Additionally, the U.S. president has chosen not to bomb Iran-allied Houthi militants at present, despite appeals from Saudi Arabia, according to Trump administration officials who spoke to The New York Times. In the meantime, crude exports from the Middle East have remained resilient following Saudi Arabia’s shutdown of its crucial East-West pipeline due to attacks, as stated by JPMorgan analysts in a note dated Sept. 18. Total oil flows averaged 17 million barrels per day over the past 10 days, which is 6 million bpd below the 2025 average, they reported. Exports through the Strait of Hormuz have steadily increased, with flows from the broader Middle East reaching approximately 80% of pre-war levels, according to Ryan McKay, director of commodity strategy at TD Securities. McKay stated in a Monday note that without a major escalation, Iran may have lost significant leverage in the Strait. However, the security situation in the region continues to be volatile and susceptible to sudden escalation. McKay noted that the oil market is struggling with multiple near-term drivers that are engaged in a tug of war for prices. The Houthis announced that they launched missiles at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, and targeted Aramco facilities at the Yanbu crude export terminal on the Red Sea over the weekend. At least two tankers have been attacked while transiting the Strait of Hormuz in the past day, based on incident reports from the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations Centre. Trump also told Fox that he is in a ‘deciding mode’ and that ‘very big things’ will happen soon concerning the Iran war. He described the options as ‘wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically, or making a deal,’ as reported by Fox. Meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned that it will expand the ‘geography of the conflict’ if the U.S. launches renewed strikes against the Islamic Republic, according to the state media outlet Tasnim.