Mafia: The Old Country's Free Ride Update Is Out Now, Replacing Its...

While the Mafia series has always been more about telling a linear story than letting players explore fully-realised open worlds (with the possible exception of Mafia 3) Mafia: The Old Country was even more linear than most. Its story ushered players through its slice of Sicilian countryside in a rather impatient manner, and while its Explore mode technically offered freedom to roam, roaming was all you could do.

But with the release of the Free Ride update, that's all changed. Well, slightly changed. Free Ride replaces Explore mode completely, offering a similarly open-ended experience while fleshing it out with actual stuff to do. Whether or not this stuff is worth doing is another question, but at the very least it's an improvement over nothing.

Primarily, Free Ride introduces two new activity types—the old videogame staples of racing and combat. Races come in both car and horse varieties, though vehicles get substantially more love than their equine counterparts. Petrolheads can participate in three lap-based circuit races, three linear road sprints, and six time trials. Horses just get three circuit races, though given how little I enjoyed wrangling gee-gees in The Old Country's story mode, that's probably enough.

On the fighting side, Free Ride adds five straight up gunfights called Standoffs, and four Assassination missions that are more stealth focussed, requiring you to murder a specific target. An article on the 2K website detailing the update also mentions Free Ride is "hiding its share of secrets" through the world, offering "powerful rewards" to those who find them.

I imagine these rewards will be of the car, gun, or knife variety given The Old Country's relatively limited toolset. The update certainly adds more of those tools into the game, however, introducing four new knives, three extra guns, two more cars, three additional charms and sixteen new outfits.

In short, Free Ride upgrades Explore from an empty open world to a very, very basic open world. Which is still better, and something Hangar 13 didn't need to do. But I don't think it's going to convince me to return to Sicily any time soon.

Elsewhere, the update folds in several other features alongside Free Ride such as a photo mode, a black & white Cinema Siciliano mode with deliberately derezzed audio and Sicilian language set by default, plus a Classic difficulty setting apparently inspired by the original Mafia. Most interesting to me, though, is the introduction of first-perso

Source: PC Gamer