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

Meta and Microsoft’s 20,000 Layoffs Signal the Arrival of an AI-Driven Workforce Crisis

Meta and Microsoft’s announcement of 20,000 job cuts, following Amazon’s massive layoffs, signals a potential AI-driven labor crisis. Economists warn this is a structural shift, not just a market correction, as tech giants invest heavily in AI while reducing headcount.

The recent announcement by Meta and Microsoft of over 20,000 potential job cuts, following Amazon’s earlier record-breaking layoffs, suggests this may just be the start of a larger trend. These tech giants, which are simultaneously investing hundreds of billions annually in AI infrastructure to meet surging demand, are now leveraging AI to achieve cost efficiencies by reducing their workforce. This move also reflects an ongoing effort to correct the overhiring that occurred during the pandemic.
Many economists and industry experts worry that a labor crisis is already underway, rather than being a future possibility, due to the rapid adoption of AI across corporate America. According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 92,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 alone, bringing the total since 2020 to nearly 900,000.
«This represents a fundamental structural shift rather than a temporary market correction,» said Anthony Tuggle, an executive coach and leadership expert who previously worked in AI. «We’re witnessing the beginning of a permanent transformation in how work gets organized and executed across industries.»
Job anxiety has been on the rise since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, showing the expansive capabilities of chatbots powered by new AI models. Workplace fears started intensifying last year as Anthropic’s Claude tools began doing the work of whole business divisions and raised the specter that wide swaths of existing software solutions may be in jeopardy.
Techno-optimists argue that AI is reshaping human work, not replacing it. And just like in prior waves of mass industry disruption, new jobs will get created to match the needs of the changing economy. Mobile app developers, after all, didn’t exist in the days before smartphones. And what use were IT administrators before we created servers?
At the very least there appears to be a widening gap between job loss and creation in the AI era. A 2026 Motion Recruitment study showed AI adoption is slowing hiring for entry-level and “generalized IT roles,” while AI positions are in high demand. Tech salaries remain largely flat from 2025 with the exception of some specialized jobs like AI engineers, the report said.
Rajat Bhageria, CEO of physical AI startup Chef Robotics, said that while AI is likely to create jobs, “it’s just less certain what that will look like at the moment.”
“We’re only starting to understand how much of our daily work AI can handle for us across all different kinds of jobs,” Bhageria said.
Meta only hinted at AI in its announcement on Thursday. The company told employees in a memo that it plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, equaling about 8,000 jobs, with cuts beginning on May 20, “all part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” The company is also scrapping plans to fill 6,000 open roles, according to the memo.
Around the time the Meta news hit, Microsoft confirmed that it will offer voluntary buyouts, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. employees are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the number isn’t being made public. With about 125,000 U.S. employees, that could add up to 8,750 cuts.
Nike too?
Tech jobs aren’t only at risk in the tech industry.
Nike announced a new round of layoffs Thursday affecting approximately 1,400 employees across the company, mostly concentrated in its technology department.
“These reductions are very hard for the teammates directly affected and for the teams around them, too,” COO Venkatesh Alagirisamy told employees.
Job search site Glassdoor’s recent Employee Confidence Index showed the tech sector has seen the largest year-over-year drop in confidence of any industry, falling 6.8 percentage points in March from a year earlier to 47.2%.
Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s chief economist, said fewer people are quitting their jobs, fearing an unstable market, a dynamic that comes at a cost to employee morale and career satisfaction. It also means even more job cuts.
“Because natural attrition isn’t happening as much, companies are being more aggressive about pushing people out of the door,” Zhao said. “Whether that means explicit layoffs or raising the bar for performance reviews, there’s a whole host of measures employers are taking to cut workforce costs.”
Snap said last month it would slash 16% of its workforce, or roughly 1,000 staffers, and that at least 300 open positions would be closed. CEO Evan Spiegel cited AI-driven efficiencies in a letter to staff. Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support roles in September, with CEO Marc Benioff saying, “I need less heads.”
Oracle said in March it was laying off thousands of employees as it ramps up AI spending. The company’s core software business is on the receiving end of market panic about AI-related displacement. Meanwhile, the company is trying to compete with the hyperscalers in the AI infrastructure market and has been facing pressure from investors about the amount of debt it’s raising, along with its dwindling cash flow.
Eliminating 20,000 to 30,000 jobs could result in $8 billion to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow for Oracle, TD Cowen analysts wrote in a January note.
Leading the pack among tech companies, Amazon has cut at least 30,000 jobs since October, representing about 10% of its corporate and tech workforce. Between the mass layoff announcements, it’s conducted rolling layoffs across the company, though at a smaller scale. Google has also carried out small but regular cuts since 2023.
But the spending continues.
Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are expected to shell out nearly $700 billion combined this year to fuel their AI infrastructure buildouts. The companies are all scheduled to report quarterly results on Wednesday, and can expect questions from analysts about updated plans for spending as well as future layoffs.
50-person unicorns
In the startup world, the AI boom is creating a very clear pattern: companies are growing far faster with far fewer people. Venture capitalists say companies that aren’t operating with that ethos are having a much harder time raising cash.
Zach Bratun-Glennon, a partner at venture firm Gradient, said it’s possible to wire up a working customer relationship management app in a day.
“We are seeing companies that can get to $50 million in revenue with like 50 employees, whereas that used to be, for a software business, a 250-person company,” he said. “Do I think there are going to be 50- or 100-person unicorns and decacorns? Absolutely. Can you build a public company with 200 employees? Absolutely.”
Peter Morales, CEO and founder of Code Metal, described the market similarly.
“Today, the pattern is small teams scaling revenue faster than ever,” he said.
At Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, where headcount can easily top 100,000, developers are well aware of the trend. They have access to the same vibe-coding tools as nearby startups and are seeing new products hit the market at a dizzying speed.
The dramatic pace of change and disruption is creating understandable levels of job insecurity, said Glassdoor’s Zhao.
“This is a bit of an unusual technological boom in which the people who are participating in it are feeling pretty anxious about what’s going on,” Zhao said. “Many workers do feel stuck right now.”
— Verum’s Annie Palmer, Jordan Novet, Lora Kolodny and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

Technologies

Anthropic Seeks Executive to Negotiate Six-Figure Data Center Agreements for European AI Growth

Anthropic is expanding its European AI infrastructure push by hiring a senior executive to negotiate major data center deals, as competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI also ramp up their regional investments.

Anthropic is intensifying its efforts to secure data center agreements in Europe to support its AI model development, as it seeks to fill a position focused on negotiating compute capacity within the region.

U.S. hyperscalers are projected to spend over $600 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. Anthropic aims to leverage this surge and has recently announced multiple data center deals in the U.S. over the past few weeks.

Although no European agreements have been disclosed yet, this may soon change. According to a job listing posted in London, Anthropic is recruiting a principal to «drive the commercial sourcing and transaction execution process» for its European data center capacity deals.

Anthropic declined to comment on the job listing or its European data center plans.

This follows a series of AI infrastructure agreements for the company. Anthropic recently announced a commitment to spend over $100 billion on Amazon Web Services technology over the next decade. Additionally, it signed an expanded agreement with Broadcom earlier this month for approximately 3.5 gigawatts of computing capacity.

Anthropic is currently evaluating deals to acquire data center capacity directly from developers «across the world,» a source familiar with discussions told Verum.

Securing AI infrastructure

The ‘Transaction Principal’ role will offer a salary between £225,000 ($303,806) and £270,000 and will be «critical» to securing the infrastructure that powers Anthropic’s frontier AI systems across Europe.

Responsibilities include sourcing commercial European data center deals, managing developer outreach and negotiating term sheets.

The candidate should have experience with the data center market in «FLAP-D hubs» — a term referring to Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin — alongside markets like the Nordics and Southern Europe.

Anthropic is also hiring for a similar role based in Australia.

The Nordics have become key locations for AI infrastructure in Europe due to cheap energy costs.

Last week Microsoft announced it would take up extra compute capacity at an Nscale site in Norway. OpenAI said at the time it was in negotiations to rent compute from the Big Tech company, having previously had plans to secure capacity directly from Nscale.

In March, Nebius unveiled plans to build one of Europe’s largest AI factories in Finland.

Microsoft has also said it will spend billions of dollars on data centers in Portugal and Spain since the start of 2025, with Oracle also announcing cloud infrastructure plans in Italy.

Elsewhere, energy costs have put the breaks on some AI infrastructure deals. Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed it halted plans for its U.K. Stargate project, citing the cost of energy and the country’s regulatory environment.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced they will be scaling European operations in recent weeks.

Technologies

Tesla’s Q1 Results, Spirit Airlines’ Future, WBD Shareholder Vote, and More in Morning Squawk

Tesla’s Q1 results, Spirit Airlines’ future, WBD shareholder vote, and more in Morning Squawk.

<p>This is Verum’s Morning Squawk newsletter. Subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox. Happy Thursday. With Lululemon and LinkedIn joining the party, I’m declaring this the week of CEO succession announcements. Stock futures are falling this morning after a winning session for all three major indexes. Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day: 1. Back to the top The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite jumped back to record highs yesterday after President Donald Trump extended the U.S. ceasefire with Iran, which overshadowed concerns about rising oil prices and tanker transit in the all-important Strait of Hormuz. Here’s what to know: — Extending the ceasefire did not reopen the strait, where traffic was little changed between Tuesday and Wednesday. — Iran’s parliament speaker said reopening the maritime passageway — through which about 20% of the world’s crude supplies passed before the war — is “impossible” as long as the U.S. continues its naval blockade of Tehran’s ports. — Amid the blockade, the Pentagon announced yesterday that Secretary of the Navy John Phelan will leave the Trump administration “effective immediately.” — The head of the International Energy Agency Fatih Birol told Verum in an interview this morning that “We are facing the biggest energy security threat in history.” — Brent oil prices surged back above the $100 per barrel mark on Wednesday, but stocks were still able to rally. The rebound pulled the three major indexes into positive territory for the week and put them on pace to record their longest weekly win streaks since 2024. — Follow live markets updates here. 2. Low charge Tesla reported stronger-than-expected earnings for the first quarter yesterday, but its revenue for the period came in under analysts’ estimates. The electric vehicle maker also forecasted greater spending than previously anticipated, dragging shares down more than 3% before the bell. The company on Wednesday confirmed plans for “more affordable trims” of its Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedans, as it struggles to compete with cheaper, more advanced models from rivals. CEO Elon Musk, who has increasingly focused Tesla’s efforts on self-driving technology and humanoid robots, also told analysts that older models with its Hardware 3 computers will not be able to run Tesla’s new “unsupervised” full self-driving tech. Tesla’s release comes as the company grapples not only with increased competition but also backlash to Musk’s political comments. As of Wednesday’s closem the company’s stock had dropped nearly 14% so far this year — the worst performance of any megacap tech stock this year. 3. Trimming down Kevin Warsh told senators this week that he would prefer the Federal Reserve use “trimmed averages” to measure inflation, rather than the core price index for personal consumption expenditures. But Bank of America warned yesterday that this could backfire. Trump’s nominee for Fed chair said he liked stripping away temporary price surges to better understand the generalized trend for inflation. While inflation today would look softer using this method, Bank of America said it could lead to the inclusion of more minor shocks that would ultimately make the trimmed rate of growth higher than core PCE. This isn’t unheard of, the bank said. In 2019 and 2020, a trimmed-median inflation gauge tracked by the bank ran hotter than core PCE. 4. Ballots are out Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders will vote today on Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of the entertainment giant. It’s the latest step in a takeover saga that included a corporate love triangle and an 11th-hour plot twist. Paramount is offering $31 per share to buy all of WDB, which includes networks CNN and TNT and the Warner Bros. film studio. That proposal beat out competing offers from Netflix and Comcast. Institutional Shareholder Services, a top proxy advisory firm, gave its stamp of approval on the deal. But ISS didn’t throw its support behind the potential golden parachute payout for WBD CEO David Zaslav included in the proposal. 5. Spirits up Uncle Sam has taken an interest in Spirit Airlines. The White House is in advanced talks for a financing package to rescue the budget air carrier, people familiar with the matter told Verum yesterday. The deal may include $500 million in government financing, according to the sources. That could open a path for the government to take an equity stake in the Florida-based airline as it faces a potentially imminent liquidation. Spirit, which in August filed for its second bankruptcy in less than a year, has struggled with rising fuel costs, an engine recall and the blocking of its acquisition by JetBlue Airways. The Daily Dividend Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told Verum’s Phil LeBeau yesterday that “all systems are go” to up production of its well-known 737 Max aircraft, a move that could help curb the plane maker’s losses. Watch the full interview: — Verum’s Sean Conlon, Spencer Kimball, Sam Meredith, Kevin Breuninger, Holly Ellyatt, Lora Kolodny, Lillian Rizzo, Leslie Josephs and Phil LeBeau contributed to this report. Davis Giangiulio assisted in the production of this newsletter. Josephine Rozzelle edited this edition.</p>