Video Game / Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven

aka: Mafia

Welcome to the family.^note (From L-R) Paulie Lombardo, Frank Colletti, Don Salieri, Thomas Angelo, Sam Trapani

Thomas "Tommy" Angelo is an ordinary taxi driver working in the city of Lost Heaven during The Great Depression. One evening, he is caught in a wild car chase involving thugs of two rivaling mobs in town trying to kill each other. Forced to side with one party, he soon faces retribution from the other and has no choice but to start working for Don Salieri, whose men he saved earlier. This turns out to be a wise decision, since the other family is much worse. Thus begins Tommy's ascension from a simple yet impoverished cabbie to the best driver and hitman in the entire mob.

Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, often shortened to Mafia, is a 2002 Third-Person Shooter created by the Czech development studio Illusion Softworks (the guys behind Hidden & Dangerous, later renamed 2K Czech), which combines an affectionate pastiche to the classic Italian-American Mafia movies (Scarface (1932), The Godfather, The Untouchables (1987) and so on) with a Grand Theft Auto-like gameplay to produce a sweeping storyline with many sudden revelations, intense gunfights, and adrenaline-laden chases in vintage cars.

The game had many unique features for its genre and time, including storing the aftermath of player actions in the city, even if the player left the location for a long time: e.g. if you shot at a car in Free Ride, it is possible to run into that same car later on in a different part of the city; abandoned cars and weapons stay where they are, instead of disappearing after a while as in Grand Theft Auto, cars deform in real time as opposed to using pre-modelled damaged parts, etc. The game was noted for exceptional graphics for its time and a sophisticated police AI.

The sequel, Mafia II, came out in August 2010 and features the new setting of Empire Bay, a new protagonist and a supposedly Darker and Edgier storyline, plus New Roman Legions and Nazis with Gnarly Weapons in the opening. Mafia III came out in 2016 and is set in the New Orleans Expy of New Bordeaux, which marked a stark departure from the series by putting players in the shoes of African-American Vietnam War veteran-turned-mobster Lincoln Clay along with the Civil Rights Era setting and social commentary towards white supremacism and criticism of the Vietnam War.

In September 2020, a 4K Ultra HD remake of the original game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, developed by Hangar 13 (the studio behind Mafia III) and published by 2K. It was released as part of the Mafia: Trilogy package, which contains Definitive Edition versions of all three Mafia games; the aforementioned remake of the first game, a remaster of II, and a major update of III. Because the second and third games did not receive nor needed remakes, their Definitive Editions were released in May 2020, with pre-existing owners of those games on Steam (both games), PS4 and Xbox One (III only) getting the Definitive Edition updates for free.

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Tropes common to both versions

• The '30s: The games are set in this decade where unemployment is rampant, alcohol smuggling is the most lucrative business and the American Mafia is rather powerful.
• Bad Boss: Don Morello and his younger brother.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Two of the missions in the original game see Tommy encounter naked women, namely Sarah and Michelle. Except that not only were their private parts obscured by a Scenery Censor, attempting to view them through hacking or by importing the .4DS files in a modelling tool such as 3DS Max or Zmodeler would yield Sarah and Michelle lacking nipples and other private bits. This perhaps saved Illusion Softworks the trouble of potentially being slapped with a harsher M rating descriptor for nudity. Those who are curious enough to try and see Sarah in her birthday suit in the remake would be disappointed to know that like in the original game, not only was the body model anatomically incorrect, the textures have Sarah's nipples covered up by gray squares instead.
• Benevolent Boss: Don Salieri (who turns out to be no different from Morello, in the end).
• Bittersweet Ending: Tommy finishes telling his story, testifies against the family and gets 80 gangsters thrown in jail, with some getting the chair and Salieri himself getting life in prison. The police then gets him and his family new identities, moves them across the country to a good looking neighborhood and a respectable job for Tommy. Basically everything seems to have worked out great...then we flash forward 20 something years, where we see an aged Tommy watering his lawn when a couple of thugs show up. One of them calls Tommy by his real name (which was changed by the feds) and says "Mr. Salieri sends his regards" while his companion blasts Tommy in the chest with a sawn-off shotgun. The game then ends with his thoughts as he lies bleeding on the lawn. In Mafia II, Vito and Joe are revealed to be the hitmen.
• The City: Lost Heaven, a No Communities Were Harmed version of Chicago with elements of San Francisco and New York.
• Cool Car: One way residents show off that they have it made is by the cars that they drive. As an example, Don Morello has a Silver Fletcher as his ride of choice and silver it is with its chrome paint job.
• Deconstruction: The game's pretty much a realistic take on how much a risk would it be should one join the Mafia. Tommy was forced into joining the mob, since he had nothing to lose, but eventually is disillusioned as he witnesses his friends getting caught up and his morality at a slippery slope. Emphasized even further by the Bittersweet Ending.
• Deadly Distant Finale: The epilogue takes place in 1951, where two men assassinate Tommy in retribution for him turning pentito.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The title says it all, you play someone who becomes part of the Mafia (albeit reluctantly).
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Not as acute of an example as some games, but give a vehicle enough gunfire and it'll explode, sending the wheels flying off almost cartoonishy. This allows vehicles to double as grenades-on-wheels against mooks.
• Fauxrrari: The original game leans more on the Bland-Name Product approach, with vehicles heavily resembling their real life counterparts aside from a few details altered here and there, and a Punny Name alluding to what the car is supposed to be based on, e.g. "Ulver Airstream" for the Chrysler Airflow.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Tommy starts out as an ordinary cabbie, but eventually becomes a fearsome hitman.
• The Great Depression: The whole plot of the game, except the final scene of the epilogue, takes place between 1930 and 1938, dead smack in the middle of it.
• The Hero Dies: Tommy is killed after moving out of his criminal life.
• How We Got Here: The entire story is a series of Tommy's flashbacks, as he relates his criminal past to Detective Norman.
• The Mafia: Well, duh.
• Meaningful Name: Thomas Angelo from the city of Lost Heaven, eh? And what is the nickname for the classic gangster's signature weapon, the Thompson submachine gun? The Tommy Gun!
• Mob Debt: The third mission, "Ordinary Routine", has a unique spin on this. Rather than the protagonist, Tommy Angelo, being the one to owe money to either the Salieri or Morello Crime Families, he's instead been given the task of collecting protection money owed by several businesses across Lost Heaven alongside Sam and Paulie. While the first two collections succeed without incident, the motel is a different story, with Morello's goons placing said motel under new management. Tommy is ultimately forced into a shootout with them, wiping them out and stealing back the debt owed by the motel's manager to Salieri.
• Mob War: Tommy gets caught in the war between the Salieri and Morello families.
• Redemption Equals Death: Tommy himself at the end.
• Retcon: In the original version of the game, the assassins who killed Tommy were unnamed minor NPCs. When Mafia II was released in 2010, they were retconned to be Vito Scaletta and Joe Barbaro to tie the second installment of the franchise with its predecessor. The remake has Vito and Joe appear with their modern designs instead of the generic thugs in suits.
• "Rise and Fall" Gangster Arc: The game follows Tommy Angelo's circumstantial start to a life of crime in 1930, then shows his gradual rise to power from 1932 to 1935, his downfall and eventual quitting of the Mafia in 1938, and finally his assassination and death in 1951.
• Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic:
  • Leans heavily towards the realistic side. Cars handle a lot less "floaty" than more higher-action games like Grand Theft Auto, driving takes mass and momentum into account so you turn slower than in most other driving games and can't just accelerate or brake on a dime, and even moderate damage to the engine can seriously affect your vehicle's performance. Gunplay-wise, the game averts One Bullet Clips, both you and the enemies can run out of ammo in extended firefights, and everyone dies after only a few shots.
  • This is still present in the remake, though downplayed compared to the original. Cars still are more weighty than most other open-world games, but you can now smash them up a lot more without them suddenly dropping to a max speed of 10 mph because of a busted engine. One Bullet Clips are now in effect and enemies have the usual unlimited ammo for reloads, though the gunplay is clunkier compared to Mafia III to reflect the fact that Tommy isn't a trained soldier like Lincoln or Vito were.
• Vehicular Sabotage: The mission "Fair Play" has Tommy steal a racecar meant to be competing against the Salieri family's preferred driver and taking it to a mechanic that will tinker with it and cause it to give out at high speeds, thus taking him out of the race.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can run over people, shoot them, stab them, and cause gigantic amounts of mayhem, and the people will just keep taking it; even if you block traffic and then drag people out of their cars one at a time and shoot them, the rest will just keep honking their horns till they're dragged out too.
• Wham Episode: "The Death of Art".
• Witness Protection: Frank gets one after testifying against the Salieri gang and Tommy has to fight his way to catch up with him. Tommy himself gets police protection and a new identity and home at the end after testifying against Salieri. It doesn't prevent Salieri from finding him however, even if it took some years.

The City of Lost Heaven

• Anachronism Stew: It's the 1930s, but holds some design ideas, especially with vehicles, that reach as far forward as to the 1950s. Mostly not jarring, due to the Rule of Cool.
  • There is one moment worth mentioning, namely early mission called "Molotov Party" in which Tommy uses Molotov Cocktails to wreck some rival family's cars. That part of the game takes place in 1930, whereas Molotovs didn't see widespread use until the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Granted, it could be hand waved by saying that Salieri's weapon master came up with the idea on his own, but Vincenzo audibly calls them Molotovs, a name coined by the Finns during the Winter War in 1939 after Josef Stalin's foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.
  • There are also bars open in 1930 complete with large signage which taxi fares openly asked to be driven to. This is the middle of Prohibition, the only bars that served alcohol were clandestine speakeasies.
  • A good chunk of the soundtrack for Lost Heaven's various districts uses Django Reinhardt's mid-1940s music, while the game ends in 1938. Not only that, it's Gypsy jazz, which was popular in Europe and unheard of in the USA for a long time. The Mills Brothers tracks meanwhile are more era/location-accurate.
  • Latcho Drom's "La Verdine" (used twice - during the foot chase that ended up convincing Tommy to join Salieri's gang, and during the much later car chase when Tommy goes after Sergio Morello) is a piece from The '90s.
  • The city of Lost Heaven has an airport with a paved runway. Although the first paved runway in the United States was opened in 1928 - a few years before the setting of the game - such runways were very few and far between before the onset of World War II and much larger aircraft made them a necessity.
• Anti-Villain: Tommy clearly isn't bloodlusted, yet he still commits a pretty considerable number of murders. Some victims deserve it, some are just in the way of Salieri's plans. He does show mercy on several occasions though, and he truly cares for his friends and family, which in the end is the reason he leaves the Mafia and testifies against his former partners. However, this is also the reason he gets killed in the end.
• Badass Bystander: In the middle of the airport shootout, a mechanic will drive up, jump out of his car wielding a crowbar, and start beating up everyone he sees wielding a gun. This includes both you and the FBI agents shooting at you.
• Batter Up!: A baseball bat can be used by Tommy. A fully charged swing from behind can knock anyone out cold instantly, but there is little use for this (Mafia being a run-and-gun game for the most part, after all). However, there's a part of the "Better Get Used To It" mission where Tommy and Paulie have to beat the crap out of hoodlums with bats - and with careful maneuvering around the bad guys, Tommy can score several one-hit-KOs this way. Just be careful not to hit Paulie with this attack.
• Bloodstained Glass Windows: After bursting in on the funeral of the guy you killed.
• Bond One-Liner: "Damn, that is one hot dame".
• Born Lucky: Sergio Morello is one lucky bastard, escaping several assassinations attempts by the Salieri gang. Tommy eventually catches up to him and offs him, not before tearing through tons of armed mooks.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Tommy gets entangled with the mafia completely by accident and ends up driving two mobsters to safety because he doesn't have much of a choice. When Salieri pays him for his efforts and offers him a position in the mob, Tommy actually intends to refuse, but is forced into the life when the Morello family goes after him in retaliation.
• Car Chase Shoot-Out: Several notable shootouts involving car chases happen, with the most prominent being the opening level, where a then-cabbie Tommy Angelo is forced at gunpoint by Sam and Paulie to serve as their getaway driver from a group of Morello's thugs, themselves in cars, chasing them.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Used by the Morello Family on Sam in "A Trip to the Country" and on a dockworker in "Buon Appetito!".
• Collection Sidequest: Lucas Bertone's missions are essentially this, towards the end of some of the campaign's main missions. He rewards Tommy by teaching him how to steal rare cars, and gives him their location so he can steal them. Once brought back to Salieri's restaurant, they are parked alongside those Ralph provides to Tommy.
• Convenient Misfire: The third assassination attempt on Sergio Morello has the Tommy Gun jam when Paulie tries to gun down the target in front of the Rainbow Garden Restaurant.
• The Consigliere: Frank is Don Salieri's trusted counsellor. Until the day he betrays him.
• Cool Car: The last cars Ralphie provides to Tommy, pretty much all the cars Lucas Bertone helps Tommy to steal and most of the bonus cars in the freeride mode are this.
• Dashed Plot Line: The original game is a collection of various episodes of a long Mob War spread over the years, recounted by the Player Character.
• Developer's Foresight: In an early mission, you need to save one of your allies during a protection money run. Normally, you get ambushed while saving him, and have to gun down the guys who steal your money during said ambush. That said, if you find the guy who steals from you and kill him before saving Sam, the mission ends then and there.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The whole game builds up to you finally dealing with Big Bad Don Morello, whose thugs are the ones who ran Tommy out of the taxi driver business in the first place. You finally manage to kill him about 3/4ths of the way through the game, with the remainder of the game dealing with the gradual collapse of Tommy's Mafioso lifestyle.
• Discretion Shot: At the end of an early level, "The Running Man", there is one after the two mafiosi that have been chasing you go into Salieri's bar.
• Disgusting Public Toilet: During the mission where he has to assassinate a politician on his birthday party on a steamboat, Tommy disguises himself as a sailor and must find a gun in the toilets. As expected, he is disgusted as soon as he enters them.
• Drugs Are Bad: Tommy explains to Norman in the third Intermezzo that the Cosa Nostra wanted nothing to do with drugs. Norman was left wondering as he assumed it didn't matter for criminals to do every evil deed just as long as it brought a lot of revenue for them, but Tommy further explained that unlike the Irish Mob and the Triads who are not above drug trafficking, the American Mafia simply avoided engaging in such activities as while they can indeed make a quick buck selling dope, a drug junkie or dealer who is caught by the police may end up ratting the family out and thus compromise the Mafia's secrecy.
• Emergency Weapon: In most missions, Tommy carries a Colt Detective Special as a backup gun. It does pitiful damage and Tommy doesn't carry extra ammo for it, so it's only really good for headshoting someone and taking their gun if you run out of ammo for everything else. You can also resort to your fists, but against gun-wielding opponents you're pretty much already dead at that point if it comes down to that.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Oddly enough, but only for cars.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Cars are a lot less explosion-prone than most other games in the genre, but they'll still go up in a fireball if you put a hundred rounds or so into the engine, or shoot the fuel tank a few times.
• Foreshadowing: In A Trip To The Country's opening, Paulie jibs Tommy for his Love Interest in Sarah, before bringing up that they simply can't talk about their criminal activity at home. Tommy's response boils down to, "You're just supposed to lie to your wife for the rest of your life?" Even after he does marry her, his witness protection status aside this is exactly what Tommy does to evade being found by the Salieri. Not that it works forever.
• Former Friends Photo: Rival mob bosses Don Salieri and Don Morello are introduced as long-time bitter enemies, but towards the end of the game, Tommy finds an old photo◊ of them back in their youth, when they were best friends working as caporegimes for the then-Don Peppone. This photo is part of what makes Tommy realize that Being Evil Sucks.
• Framing Device: The game starts with Tommy meeting with the city's chief of police and recounting the events that led to him joining and eventually leaving the mafia, which forms the basis for the game's missions.
• Game-Breaking Bug: A minor one, but gangsters with shotguns in FreeRide, who start off driving a car, occasionally have a glitch where their shotguns rapid fire until they need to reload, which is deadly in close range, but not too much of a problem farther away.
• Genre Shift:
  • For some levels, especially "Visiting Rich People" and "Happy Birthday!", the game turns into a Stealth-Based Game.
  • "Fairplay" is a Racing Game mission.
• Gotta Catch 'Em All: The cars in the game, which you need to collect to be able to access in other modes, and the Bonus Cars, which include a tank, Batmobile Expy, a hippie-mobile, and a fragile taxi that can go from 0 to 90 in less than a second.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The enemies in the abandoned prison in "Election Campaign" have no reason to exist other than for a shootout. If Tommy approaches them unarmed, they attack him for absolutely no reason. The remake at least foreshadows that the prison is currently occupied by homeless squatters and that they're on edge because the police are scheduled to evict them.
• Great Offscreen War: World War II occurs during the timeskip between the frame story and the epilogue, but is only a footnote in Tommy's story.
• Hide Your Children: Semi-averted. What appears to be a youngster shows up in the opening FMV, and a mission had Tommy rescue Frank Colletti's daughter Alice along with her mother. Don't expect them to roam the streets in the main game and Freeride, though.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted. While Tommy can hide quite a few pistols in his coat, he can only conceal one large gun at a time while carrying another in his hands. Picking up a third large weapon or attempting to conceal your weapon will prompt Tommy to drop the one he is currently carrying. The sequel plays this trope straight.
• In Medias Res: The game's Framing Device is that it's a massive flashback that Tommy relays to a cop while blowing the whistle on his boss.
• In-Vehicle Invulnerability: Averted. Bullets can still hit you inside a car (although you gain some protection) and crashes will injure the occupants.
• It Gets Easier: Played straight and deconstructed. Tommy gets used to gunning down enemy scum and defying the law for profit, but finds himself reluctant to kill people he feels empathy for. This signs his death warrant in the end.
• It's Like I Always Say: Played with for irony:
  Tommy Before He Decides To Join The Mob: Better to be poor and alive than rich and dead, right?
  Tommy After He Decides To Join The Mob: So like I always say: better to die young and loaded.
• Little Useless Gun: The Colt Detective Special compact revolver does pitiful damage (even less than the regular .38 special revolver) and has relatively poor accuracy. The only reason to use it is if you run out of ammo for all your other guns. In one of the final cutscenes, Tommy shoots a guy point blank in the chest with one, and after the cutscene ends the guy is perfectly fine and still shooting at you.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The PS2 port is the primary offender of this trope - it takes around 30 seconds - 1 minute for a mission, Freeride, or race to load. Add additional time to load up the New Ark/Hoboken district when crossing the Guiliano Bridge, entering the countryside, or going inside a building. Expect to clock half your game time waiting for the damn game to load. Averted with the PC version though - the time it takes is about 10 seconds and the game doesn't have to load when crossing the Guiliano Bridge.
• Made of Iron:
  • Unlike every other opponent in the game, the final boss can survive a staggering number of bullets, simply because he's the final boss (it takes at least 20 shots from the Colt M1911, which normally kills enemies in just a few hits). Notably, this game was made back when that sort of thing was still considered normal.
  • The burly interrogator from the country motel mission tries to attack you with his fists and gets promptly gunned down. However, after you kill the rest of the Morello goons and save Sam, a cutscene plays in which the interrogator gets back up and ambushes you from behind. At this point he attacks you with a revolver and has about twice as much health as a normal enemy. Getting gunned down the second time finally puts him down for good.
• Make an Example of Them: After Tommy informs Salieri about punks attacking him and Sarah, Paulie is ready to kill them all. Salieri sees it otherwise:
  Salieri: Paulie, Paulie take it easy. Nobody's killing anybody, get it? I want you to teach them a lesson. BREAK EVERY BONE IN THEIR BODIES AND LEAVE 'EM LYING IN THE POOL OF THEIR OWN BLOOD! MAKE SURE THOSE BASTARDS NEED A WHEELCHAIR! LITTLE KIDS I'LL LAUGH AT THEIR BUSTED FACES! LET EVERYBODY SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SOMEBODY TRASHES MY TERRITORY!!!
• Master of Unlocking: One mission for Don Salieri has Tommy recruiting the help of a lock picking master named Salvatore to steal a procurer's incriminating papers in his safe. Salvatore can open pretty much every safe in the country, and says it's hard to get up to date.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Tommy and Paulie decide to make their own big break after their mission of hauling stolen cigars for Salieri. Said cigars were the cover story for the family hauling diamonds, so lying about the nature of the job, not telling Tommy and Paulie about the payout, and keeping the larger cut of the profit for himself causes the two to see him as a Bad Boss.
• Molotov Cocktail: Oddly enough, they are named as such before 1939, when the name was coined.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: With the notable exception of the final boss, all major enemy targets are either no tougher than regular enemies (i.e. Sergio Morello) or taken out in special scripted sequences such as in a car chase or sniper mission (i.e. Don Morello).
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules:
  • Averted in gunfights. Unlike almost all other shooters, enemies have the same limited amount of ammo as the player, and it's possible to see them run out during particularly long firefights and be forced to resort to fisticuffs. A shrewd player could in theory camp his way through and occasionally provoke enemies into wasting all of their ammo, giving the player a far greater advantage.
  • All cars that pursue you during free ride, whether police- or gangster-driven, will be able to catch up to you. Enemy cars running away from you during scripted chase sequences can also defy the laws of physics, rounding corners with sharp L turns without experiencing any friction or driving straight through ambient traffic, sending civilian cars flying through the air without slowing down.
• Nintendo Hard: Like many games from the time period, Mafia is noticeably harder than the modern average. You can't take a lot of hits, you don't have Regenerating Health, and in many action levels both healing items and checkpoints are few and far between. Even on Normal difficulty you have to play the game more like a tactical shooter rather than a standard third-person shooter.
• No One Should Survive That!: Sergio. Four times. In the end Tommy decides to just chase him down and kill him rather than being discreet about it.
• One Bullet Clips: Mafia is one of those games that averts this trope, so be prepared to lose unused ammunition in your magazine when you reload. Oddly, this also applies to sawn-off shotguns, which are supposed to be fed with individual shells.
• Police Are Useless: Surprisingly averted, considering the genre. Among other things, police will immediately react to speeding and running a red light, and are extremely competent at chasing you down if you try to drive away.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Sergio Morello, and some of the Prosecutor's guards in "Visiting Rich People".
• Pop the Tires: Shooting at the tires of enemy cars is a good way to slow them down when on a chase. It is particularly useful in the fourth mission, "Ordinary Routine", since Tommy ends up having to chase one last mook who's fleeing with Salieri's money. The guy's car is just sitting outside the house even before Tommy enters it, so shooting its tires will slow it down at the end of the mission.
• Precision F-Strike: The game uses profanity only sparingly, saving them for interjections when characters get really frustrated or incensed. Even then, it's far milder than its sequel which garnered a Guinness World Record for the most cuss words in a video game.
• Reformulated Game: This led to a Porting Disaster on the PS2 and Xbox versions, which while retaining most of the content was a lot different compared to the PC release. The console releases also came with a bonus racing mode to compensate for the lack of a Freeride Extreme game mode. It didn't help that the game was developed initially for Windows in mind, hence why the console ports had to cut down a lot of corners for the game to load in such a constrained platform.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: Played straight with the relatively rare Smith & Wesson M 27 .357 magnum, which packs the big punch you'd expect. Averted with the Colt Detective Special and Smith & Wession Model 10, which fire low-power .38 special rounds and have reduced damage, stability, and fire and reload speed compared to the semi-auto Colt M1911, their only advantage being that ammo for them is somewhat more common since enemies tend to carry them more often.
• Roof Hopping: Tommy escapes on rooftops after blowing a brothel's boss' office.
• Rubber-Band A.I.: Your opponents in "Fair Play" blatantly do this.
• Run or Die: The second mission, appropriately named "Running Man". Morello's goons attack Tommy to exact revenge on him for aiding Sam and Paulie the previous night, and since Tommy is an unarmed, regular guy going up against two gunmen, he must leg it to Salieri's bar before they kill him.
• Sadist: The Morello brothers love to inflict pain.
• Satellite Love Interest: While Sarah does not exist solely to be Tommy's love interest (and, in a longer run, his wife) as one of the women Tommy needs to kill at one point turns out to be Sarah's close friend, thus making it harder for him to nail her and, in consequence, possibly making it easier for him to turn back to the light side of the law later on, but the fact remains Sarah has little to no personality and after she falls for Tommy basically overnight (and vice versa) she... never makes an appearance again while being mentioned maybe three or four times. And that happened like halfway through the game!
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: Nicknamed "Lupara". The first mission where Tommy can get one is the brothel Corleone, and Vicenzo gives him one on two occasions.
• Scenery Censor: While it is fairly obvious that Sarah and Michelle are seen naked in their respective missions at certain points, their privates are obscured by camera angles, and in Michelle's case, the bathtub she is bathing in.
• Ship Level: The mission in which Tommy has to assassinate the City Councilor takes place on a steamboat.
• Shout-Out: The revolver that hidden in the toilets for Tommy to use immediately brings Michael Corleone's assassination of Virgil Sollozzo and Mark McCluskey in The Godfather to mind.
• Silliness Switch: The Free Ride Extreme mini-campaign unlocked after beating the main game. It consists of 19 sidequests to unlock special cars; the first sidequest you're likely to find is to chase and kill a pedestrian who has Super-Speed named Speedy Gonzales, and they get even sillier from there.
• Stumbled Into the Plot: Tommy Angelo is an honest taxi driver as the game opens, when he is forced at gunpoint to help a couple mobsters escape from a rival family's attack. Later on, the same rivals destroy his car in revenge, so he has no choice but to join up with the family he unwillingly helped before.
• Super Drowning Skills: Falling in the water means instant death.
• Teens Are Monsters: Billy, the son of the City Councilor, leads a gang that terrorizes the Salieri family's neighborhood in Little Italy and would have raped Sarah had Tommy not protected her. Don Salieri responds by sending Tommy and Paulie to their hideout in Chinatown to "take care of them".
• Tranquil Fury: Most characters get at least one. Morello gets a particularly creepy one partway through the game (mostly due to limited face rigging capability at the time, but still).
• Two Shots from Behind the Bar:
  • Luigi, the bartender, packs a sawed-off shotgun behind the bar, and will not hesitate to gun you down if you attack any of your allies in the mid-mission stages.
  • The receptionist of the Corleone brothel packs a sawed-off shotgun.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable:
  • In "The Death of Art", if Tommy runs towards the entrance of the stairs to access the museum's upper floor, grenades will be thrown too soon and the Salieri mook calling his comrades will be killed. This results in the cutscene not happening and the mooks standing still and being intangible, making it impossible to finish the level.
  • Two missions in Freeride Extreme (Bridge Bombing and Exploding Celeste) involve outrunning bombs that explode at a rate tied to games frame rate, making them impossible to complete on modern hardware; capping the frame rate to 20 FPS is generally advised even among speedrunning circles.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: When Don Salieri or Paulie hire Tommy for a mission, they usually tell him everything's gonna be fine. Cue Morello's men showing up, and the ensuing shootout.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things: The final stage takes place in an art gallery. Nearly everything can be broken, and those that can't be can still show very large bullet holes. Feel free to wreak havoc on priceless works of art. At the end of the level, the detective whom you're recalling the story to will even chastise you for wrecking so much priceless art.

Definitive Edition

• Adapted Out: Yellow Pete, the other weapons vendor, doesn't exist in this game.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: Due to them using new models based on their Mafia II appearance, Vito Scaletta and Joe Barbaro look far better than the older looking and imposing thugs in the original game's ending.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • After Tommy is shot by Vito and Joe, Sarah and his family find him laid out on the grass, and tearfully stay beside him as he dies.
  • Paulie reveals to Tommy that the gangster lifestyle is getting to him as he's pushing middle-age — he's dealing with PTSD from the constant random violence, and wanting to leave it behind and live a normal life is his main motive for the bank robbery.
  • While the original game glossed over it with a series of newspaper headlines, the fall of the Salieri family is shown in the ending cutscene, with the imprisonment of Don Salieri and the arrest of Vinny and Ralph (who looks terrified, knowing he might not survive in jail without the family's protection). Tommy's time in prison is also briefly seen and changed, depicting him struggling to stay calm and sane while separated from his family.
  • Conversations between Tommy and Ralph reveal that the latter went to work for Salieri partly so he could shield himself from the hoodlums who bullied him, as well as Ralph envying Tommy as he was a good father to his children, in stark contrast to Ralph whose father subjected him to severe beatings.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • In the mission "Sarah", Sarah is shown to be a lot more defiant against her aggressors even with Tommy's help protecting her and even knees one of them in the groin area, a complete contrast to her portrayal in the original where she tried to flee the scene to get help.
  • Detective Norman in the original game was set on being the listener to all of Tommy's story, being given several leads and pieces of evidence by the latter alongside his personal wisdom. Here, Norman lists plenty of police records of the mobs' activities, providing links that Tommy himself wouldn't have known. They are depicted as being on equal footing in their discussion, and Norman is the one to point out that Morello and Salieri were friends, surprising Tommy.
  • Regular Police are a lot more heavily armed at high wanted levels, now packing bolt-action rifles that drain a lot of Tommy's health, actively carrying Tommy guns into combat instead of just using them at roadblocks and Police Detectives now showing up at high wanted levels, they can arguably put Tommy down a lot quicker than the original.
• Adaptational Heroism:
  • While the original game had Mr. Sewer, an unrestrained Sleazy Politician who ran a chain of brothels and was secretly intending to muscle in on the Salieri family's turf by using the governor's office to crush them, the new version of "Election Campaign" has Hank Turnbull, an older statesman returning to the gubernatorial arena after a long absence with the promises of not just stamping out organized crime, but the social and financial ills that cause it to take root. Tommy mentions that he's a married man with a secret reputation for frequenting prostitutes, which Salieri calls him a hypocrite for and states he can't be trusted, but after his assassination, Sarah mentions that he once put his career on the line campaigning to get women's suffrage passed.
  • In the original, it was left ambiguous as to whether or not the priest at Billy's funeral was crooked, with Tommy bribing him and telling him he was lying through his teeth when praising the deceased, who was a scumbag. This all causes the priest's admonishments of Tommy for his lifestyle to ring hollow and hypocritical. In the remake, the priest is shown as more heroic, straight up refusing to take Tommy's blood money and even inadvertently saving Tommy's life by trying to de-escalate the stand-off between Tommy and Johnny, which ends up distracting Johnny long enough to Sam to show up and kill him, preventing him from shooting Tommy. In his eulogy he also doesn't overlook the fact Billy was a criminal, unlike the original.
  • The remake treats the squatters at the old prison much more sympathetically, whereas in the original they were basically mindless zombies for you to fight. In fact, most of them won't even attack you, while the handful that do try to mess with you are unarmed.
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • Paulie is shown to be far more antagonistic and bullying of Ralph, whereas their first on-screen interaction in the original game was really just banter between the two and the original Paulie was friendlier. The original had Paulie jovially agreeing to Ralph's remark about "now having two cripples working" only for Paulie to cheekily taunt at the mechanic; the same "cripple" remark by Ralph elicits a hostile stare and a snide reply from Paulie in the remake.
  • Sam is much more competent, confident, and business-like here than he was in the original, where he was more quiet and reserved. It's much more clear from the very beginning that he's Salieri's enforcer and keeping Paulie in line, which better foreshadows his eventual killing of Paulie on Salieri's orders. The ending mission also changes the context behind his betrayal, being more cowardly from trying to get into Salieri's good graces rather than purely out of loyalty.
  • Sam and Paulie in general are much more hostile and confrontational with Tommy at the very beginning than in the original, treating him much more like a hostage than a random stranger who's saving their asses.
  • Salieri is much more brutal here than in the original game.
    • He's said to have killed a dog after it started failing him and Frank punched him in its defense when they were kids, and it's implied he helped Morello kill Don Peppone so they could take over the city.
    • It's implied that he had Frank's entire family killed after learning he was still alive. Either that, or the guys he sent took it upon themselves to wipe out the entire family, being reasonably sure Salieri wouldn't mind. Though Salieri does seem sad that Frank's family supposedly had to "die" after Tommy faked the hit, he also seems more accepting of the circumstances and holds nothing against Tommy on the matter. This differs from the original game where he wanted to support Frank's wife and daughter after his "death". Frank also mentions that, despite their long friendship, he's always expected Salieri to have him killed for one reason or another, which is part of the reason for his betrayal. Possibly Justified when considering the brutality of real-life Mafia bosses^noteEven in the present day, for the real life Sicilian Cosa Nostra and other Mafia-type organizations such as the Camorra, it’s routine to kill immediate and extended family members of those who are traitors, break the Omerta or pentiti (police informants) to spread fear, send a message and for retribution. Tommaso Buscetta, one of the first and most important pentiti, as a consequence for his decision to be an informant the Mafia had Buscetta’s sons, a son-in-law, his brother, and a nephew all killed. There was one case where an entire family was wiped out down to the second cousins of an informant. It’s a known practice for family members to publicly denounce a Mafia traitor or informant in order to save their own lives in Italy, and all the main characters are Sicilian and mention the seriousness of betraying the Omerta. The fact Salieri had the family of a traitor killed sadly shouldn't be unusual or surprising..
    • Tommy and Paulie turn on him because he's smuggling black tar heroin, not diamonds, which Paulie correctly states would have gotten all of them life in prison if they were caught.
  • This could also apply to Tommy in a way. He has much more snide comments and seems more willing to enter the world of organized crime and the violence that it entails. Most notably, while in the original Salieri orders Tommy and Paulie to trash cars of the goons who trashed his taxi to send a message to Morello after Tommy is inducted into the family, in the remake, Salieri offers him a loan and it's Tommy who turns it down in favor of getting revenge on the goons. Another notable change is his scene of leaving the funeral shootout, where instead of apologizing to the priest for the trouble and asking him to pray for his soul, he and Sam coldly give him the monetary compensation and try to get him to cover for them, fully set in their lifestyles.
  • Although Morello was far from a nice guy in the original game and his beating of a civilian over crashing into his car too extreme, in the remake's version he beats Joey Crackers to death with a tire iron despite it being Morello himself who crashed into his car!
  • Luigi, who in the original game just seems to be a kindly old barkeeper who happens to work at Don Salieri's bar, is said to be a retired, feared hitman in the remake.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • A very mild case in Sergio Morello, who's not nearly as much of an open sadist; in this version he walks in on his brother torturing the unionizer instead, and reacts with more bemusement than anything.
  • Sam, who was rather stoic and professional in the original game, is given the connection to Michelle instead of Tommy, and knowing her personally makes him urge Tommy to spare her. This is then subverted by the ending mission when Sam brushes her off out of loyalty to the family, blaming Tom for letting her live — but also double-subverted, as this means he didn't kill her as she begged for her life, and describe doing it just to twist the knife in Tommy.
  • Despite his more violent and sometimes brutal nature, Tommy is understandably shell-shocked after just having killed Morello's mistress for no reason, needing Vincenzo to help calm him down, and mentions to Paulie years later that her death still haunts him. By contrast, in the original version, despite being a little disturbed afterward, Tommy quips "damn, that is one HOT dame," as he watches her car burn.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Tommy seems a lot more fit for the mafioso lifestyle from the very start of the game as opposed to his original characterization as an Average Joe in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also when it comes to sparing his victims, he is shown to be far more aggressive and frustrated at the decision, whereas the original incarnation of the character in the first game didn't hesitate to spare the likes of Michelle and Frank. In this game he actually comes close to killing them, and still doesn't feel satisfied with letting them live. Of course this does come back to bite him later on, but still.
  • The original game never really contradicted Salieri's Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters and Reasonable Authority Figure reputation, and ultimately Tommy's falling out with him has much more to do with Tommy's actions than Salieri's. In the remake Salieri is shown in a darker light and also presented as more of a hypocrite, so him turning on Tommy feels more like Salieri showing his true colors rather than Tommy digging his own grave.
• Adaptation Expansion: More story is written that adds further complexities to the characters and their motivations, such as a more detailed exploration of Tommy and Sarah's relationship forming, and Michelle's connection to Salieri's organization being given to Sam rather than Tommy. Moments that were glossed over in the original game are given dedicated cutscenes, such as Salieri and Morello attending Frank's funeral and the arresting of the Salieri Family's members.
• Age Lift: Alice Coletti. Whereas she appears as a small child in the original game, the remake ages her up to at least in her teens.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: Unlike the original, where he was Defiant to the End, Sam begs for his life after Tommy corners him, even offering to let him go and lie to Salieri that he was dead... which is the exact same transgression he was trying to kill Tommy over.
• All for Nothing: Said word for word by Tommy after he tells detective Norman about all the troubles the rival families went through to get a supply of booze for their speakeasies and how it was all rendered pointless when prohibition was repealed..
• Arc Number: The number 13 can often be found throughout Lost Heaven, albeit more as a shameless plug for Hangar 13 rather than having anything to do with the superstition. The most blatant of which can be found at the airport where one of the hangars is numbered—well, you know.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Although Sarah was mentioned frequently in the original game and was an important person to Tommy, she only appeared prominently in one mission. The remake gives her more appearances before and after missions, each scene showing her relationship with Tommy developing further.
  • Carlo, Salieri's driver, makes minor appearances throughout the game rather than just appearing in "Bon Appetit" like in the original. He even appears in a photo in Salieri's office showing all the main cast members of the Salieri family.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The new version of "A Trip to the Country" adds a monstrous bulletproof federal police truck — referred to as the Bulworth Sentry — to the chase, making it the main vehicle pursuing the three; although it mostly resembles a 1930s Brinks Express delivery vehicle, it incorporates features of early armored personnel carriers like the Vickers Crossley Model 25 and the T7 prototype, having slatted firing ports instead of a windshield and a .50 caliber gun turret mounted on the roof. The thing's such a relentless tank on wheels that Tommy has to fire on the turret until it jams, damage the gun ports, and repeatedly firebomb the inside of the truck just to take it down.
• Bittersweet Ending: In comparison to the original, at least. Salieri's operations are shown as being taken out completely for good thanks to Tommy's testimony, with a humiliated Salieri himself shown being escorted into a tiny prison cell. And while Tommy does still get killed by Vito and Joe in 1951, Tommy here pretty much knew he was a dead man walking anyway, and calmly accepts his execution. And unlike the original, Tommy at least dies surrounded by his immediate family, rather than bleeding to death alone.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: During the street fight in the mission "Sarah", Billy's burly baseball-bat-wielding buddy has tons of health and takes an absurd amount of bat swings to the face to bring down. Averted with any of the major characters, who all go down just the same as any other Mook.
• Bullying a Dragon: Most of the squatters at the old prison are smart enough to avoid messing with a hitman toting a tommy gun, but a handful will still try to beat you up despite being unarmed, mainly out of pure stupid machismo. You can just gun them down effortlessly, especially if you boosted a tommy gun or shotgun from Vinny's armory beforehand.
• Call-Forward: Collectible cigarette cards feature and portray versions of characters from the later installments at their age and what they were up to during Tommy's era.
• Censored Title: The achievement "When God Stops Smiling" in has the word "bastard" omitted from the description "Completed 'You Lucky Bastard'", rendering it instead as "Completed 'You Lucky ...'"
• Chekhov's Gun: In "Omerta", Salieri mentions that the account books which Frank possesses contain records of every transaction made by the Salieri family, and everyone could potentially spend time in prison if they were handed to the state. He orders Tommy to retrieve the books and bring them back after silencing Frank. Later, when Tommy meets Detective Norman, he reveals that he has stolen the account books himself and plans to turn them in as evidence for Salieri's crimes.
• Compressed Adaptation: Two separate missions in the original, "The Whore" and "The Priest", are combined into a single one here titled "The Saint and the Sinner". In the original, Frank never mentions to him that he has to be the one to kill the witness, and Tommy winds up at the funeral through happenstance after escaping the cops; here, Salieri plans out the attack on the brothel as a means to distract the police as well as revenge against the hotel manager, letting Sam safely carry out the hit at the funeral before the target goes into hiding permanently.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Several major characters from future Mafia games, such as Leo Galante and Sammy Robinson, make appearances in the form of collectible cigarette cards containing younger portraits of them and a little more backstory.
  • During the epilogue, Vito and Joe wear their iconic attire from Mafia II as opposed to the blue and orange suits they wore in the original game.
• Composite Character: Whilst the events are modified in "Lucky Bastard", Sam and Vincenzo take on the role of the two mobsters from the original game when trying to kill Sergio Morello Jr. at the train tracks. But unlike in the original game, the pair survive and avoid being struck by a train.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Supporting characters will berate Tommy for not going straight towards his current objective and snooping around, typically for collectibles, special interactions, and the like.
• Costume Evolution: Sam wears other, more plain styles of clothing rather than his original blue-bowtie tuxedo. He eventually wears it in the final mission, when he claims that he's moving up the ranks of the family and is betraying Tom with the bank's money at his side.
• Creator Cameo: Almost all of the people featured in wanted posters strewn all over the game world are Hangar 13 artists, programmers and staff members; five of them were winners of a contest held by 2K Games.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Rather than branching out into either shooting the plane or stopping Morello from reaching the airport and dying at the unfinished bridge, this game makes Morello die specifically from his plane being shot down (and getting finished off).
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Much like II and III, the game definitely makes more of an effort to showcase the casual bigotry and cruelty of the time.
  • At the beginning of "Ordinary Routine", Frank and Salieri explain that they don't violently enforce debt collection like Morello's protection racket does, because they need to be seen as benevolent figures. While their first visit to an Italian baker is civil, if tense, the second stop with a "Chinaman" shop owner's nephew has Paulie beat the guy's head against the counter just to show him who's the boss, with the revelation that he did it to the elderly uncle a few years ago, too; Sam also mentions that Paulie once put a tailor from Holbrook (who, given the era, was very likely Jewish) in a wheelchair. Either Salieri doesn't mind that Sam and Paulie are brutally roughing up their minority debtors, or he doesn't care enough to find out.
• Demoted to Extra: Lucas Bertone has a much smaller role in the remake. All his optional side quests are gone, and thus he only appears in a couple cutscenes in the "Fairplay" chapter (the racing mission). Instead of giving you optional side quests at the end of most chapters, you instead can visit him during Free Ride mode to receive 5 clues to 5 bonus cars hidden around the city.
• Developer's Foresight: After the racing mission, you are given the objective to find and drive Paulie home after he gets in a drunken stupor. He protests being taken back to his apartment and suggests being dropped off at a brothel called "Blue Tropics." Despite there only being one waypoint (which leads to the apartment), you can actually follow Paulie's directions to the brothel and drop him off. This earns the "Not Classy" achievement.
• Disc-One Nuke: Your garage has a Shubert Frigate if you own Mafia II and Lincoln Clay's Samson Drifter if you own Mafia III. As a sports car and muscle car from the 50's and 60's respectively, they absolutely blow away any of the 1920's era cars you start the game out with. However, most Timed Missions force you to use a specific car provided to you, so you can't use them to cheese missions.
• Distracted by the Sexy: When Tommy and Paulie decide to go in on the bank robbery, one of the guards walks while looking at an attractive woman in the lobby, causing him to miss them entering with guns until Paulie gives him an introduction to the stock of his tommy gun.
• Dramatic Ammo Depletion: Tommy runs out of ammo just as he's about to finish Sergio off, continuing Sergio's trend of being insanely lucky. However, since Sergio is hiding in a fuel depot, Tommy just lights the fuel of fire and lets Sergio burn to death and then explode.
• Drugs Are Bad: Salieri sternly warns Tommy and the others to stay away from drugs and would not accept the idea of any "dope fiends in this neighborhood", and it's repeatedly mentioned that the Salieri Family refused to deal with the stuff, even at their most desperate, to contrast them from Morello's crew. Which makes finding out that the cigar shipment was being used to smuggle dope instead of diamonds a sign that Salieri, now firmly in control of the city, had started Jumping Off the Slippery Slope towards becoming as bad as Morello was.
• Early-Bird Cameo: The players can collect cigarette cards with biographies and portraits of characters that only figure in future installments, such as Leo Galante and Carlo Falcone (who don't appear until Mafia II) as middle-aged men who've already established themselves as major players in the Empire City underworld, or Sammy Robinson and the Marcano brothers (who don't appear until III) as teenage hoodlums and young soldatos, respectively, who are only starting to make a real impact in New Bordeaux with the death of Giuseppe Carillo.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Tommy is much more bloodthirsty in the remake than in the original and seems much more willing to kill non-combatants such as Michelle, Frank, and the Senator. However, he's clearly shocked when he accidentally blows up Sergio's mistress, and later stops Paulie from killing a waitress that Sergio was trying to use as a human shield.
  • Paulie doesn't really care much about civilian collateral damage (though this is more due to him being Hotblooded rather than maliciousness), but during the cigar heist even he is put off at the idea of killing a random, innocent truck driver to steal his customs truck. Tommy reassures Paulie they just need to scare the driver.
• Face Death with Dignity: When an older Tommy is approached by Vito and Joe in the ending before his assassination, he calmly and deliberately replies to his name being called out (despite being under witness protection), having finally accepted that his time is up and that Salieri has found him, which allows him to feel comfort that his family will be safe after he is gone; when Joe levels the shotgun at him, he doesn't even flinch. This differs from the original ending where Tommy replies with confusion when Vito calls him out, not expecting the bullet to come.
• False Flag Operation: In order to affirm Gates' defection from Morello to Salieri, Paulie plans to make a normal deal with him while making it look as though the operations were robbed. Appearing as though Morello cannot protect his allies from harm, Gates' people will decide to work with Salieri instead.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the prologue, Detective Norman mentions to Tommy that he might live long enough to walk his daughter down the aisle. We see exactly this happen in the epilogue.
  • In "Election Day", you can overhear one of Salieri's men and a supplier they're negotiating with discussing "product" and insisting that it be top quality, which seems a little out of place considering prohibition is long over by the time that mission takes place. One mission immediately afterwards you learn that Salieri has gotten into the drug dealing business.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Salieri stomping Carlo's head into red goo is thankfully covered up by a piece of clothes line.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: A short heartbeat soundtrack added to represent the paranoia in An Offer You Can't Refuse - the scene is slowed down with Sam walking towards the car and reaching into the shirt pocket, ending him in thanking Tommy and giving him an envelope with more than enough money to repair the car.
• Hide Your Children: Played straight in the remake to the point that Alice—who was a child in the original—was aged up in the mission "Omerta". It is unknown as to why, but it's likely that Hangar 13 didn't want to be bothered with concerns about portraying young children in a violent video game; though for the most part Frank's wife and daughter are cutscene characters and could not be interacted with, their possible deaths in the end would be rather squeamish to players if Alice was a little girl.
• Hope Spot:
  • The end of the mission "Great Deal". Unlike in the original, Gates and his Kentucky whiskey are genuine and he survives the Morello ambush with a flesh wound, allowing the Salieri family to set up a lucrative long-term booze pipeline that Salieri is confident will be a gravy train for his struggling crew. Then Prohibition is repealed the same year, collapsing the bootlegging industry and leaving the family right back where they started. It also explains why Paulie is still in the same position years later and growing restless thinking up more schemes — his plan didn't pay off like they thought it would, but it was still successful and not a fuck-up that embarrassed him in front of the Don, and also proved that he could contribute more than just muscle.
  • After the bank robbery, Paulie is happy to have successfully executed his plan with Tommy, which inches him closer to plans for retirement. Tommy tells Sarah that he and Paulie have faced a sudden windfall of money, and he tries to make plans for a more luxurious life for their family. He goes to Paulie's place to discuss the matters further, and finds the man dead with a gunshot to his head.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Most of the principal cast was modelled after the actors who portrayed them, with Haden Blackman stating in an interview that "we looked for actors who not only sounded the part, but also looked the part and could perform on both the motion capture stage and in the VO booth."
• Kill It with Fire: Sergio's luck runs out when Tommy finds the perfect opportunity to finish him off as Sergio is hiding in a fuel depot by lighting up the fuel barrels ablaze, frying Sergio to a crisp.
• Language Barrier: Tommy, who, ironically enough, could barely speak Italian, struggles to relay instructions to Salvatore the locksmith as he just came from his native Italy with only a scant command of English.
• Limited Loadout: Unlike the original, where you could carry about a half a dozen pistols and two long arms at once, the remake limits you to 1 pistol, 1 long arm, and 1 grenade type (frag or molotov).
• Mercy Kill: Downplayed as while Tommy did gun him down to end his suffering, it was still arguably done in cold blood.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: The game re-uses many game mechanics and assets like character animations from Mafia III, though the different era and campaign give it its own identity. The combat has also been tweaked to account for Tommy not being a trained soldier like Lincoln was, such as reduced accuracy on weapons, lower ammo capacity, and slower melee combat.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • In addition to Morello threatening his family, Frank also expresses that he's always fully expected Salieri to one day have him killed for one reason or another, which is another motivation for him wanting to abandon the Family for good.
  • Tweaked from the original. Tommy, Sam and Paulie find out that their job of hauling diamonds under cigars was a lie, as Salieri was actually sneaking heroin in their cargo. The fact that Salieri was lying to them and hid the risks of getting arrested under drug possession spurs Paulie into following his ambitions, bringing Tommy along.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: Similar to the original game, there are no real boss fights, with major targets like Sergio or Don Morello being scripted chase sequences rather than a straight shootout. Even the Final Boss is a scripted chase sequence which ends as soon as you corner and shoot him, unlike the original game where he was a genuine Made of Iron boss fight.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Speaking to Ralph after winning the race in "Fair Play" has him tell Tommy he made it look easy, and that when the races started up twenty years prior, "most guys didn't make it to the finish", referencing the infamous invokeddifficulty spike the race presented in the original game.
  • After Morello is left burned and writhing in agony by his plane crash-landing, a horrified Paulie mutters that the "poor bastard's dead and he doesn't even know it", to which Tommy responds by pumping a full machine-gun clip into him and saying that he definitely knows now — the line being a nod to the original cutscene where Morello's Silver Fletcher is rammed off the bridge. It's also eerily similar to something Salieri said after crushing Carlo's head into marinara sauce, showing that Tommy is becoming a little too much like his mentor.
  • Sam wears a blue-bowtie tuxedo in the final mission of the game to closely resemble his original design.
• Named by the Adaptation:
  • The two mobsters that attack Tommy near the beginning of the game are unnamed in the original game, whereas in the remake they are given the names Dino and Lou respectively. Also, the unfortunate sap who gets beaten to death by Morello for rear-ending his car is given the name Joey Crackers, and the unnamed city councilor in Morello's pocket that proves to be a persistent thorn in the Salieri family's side is named Roberto Ghilotti.
  • A minor example with other characters, a majority of them such as Paulie, Sam and Luigi don't have their surnames revealed in the original game, but in the remake they are provided.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: The game reuses a lot of assets from Mafia III, like for example the utility poles which even had the name "New Bordeaux" stamped on it. Even the Confederate monuments from the previous game were reused as is without any alterations.
• Noodle Incident: During "Ordinary Routine", Sam recalls how Paulie once put a tailor in a wheelchair.
• Not His Sled: Salieri actually tells Tommy and Paulie about the diamonds in the cigar shipment in the remake. However, it turns out there are no diamonds, as the real cargo is drugs, which understandably pisses Tommy and Paulie off given how severe the consequences would have been if they had gotten caught.
• Officer O'Hara: Other than the expected case from Detective Norman, the Lost Heaven Police dispatcher speaks with a strong Irish accent.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: The game is conspicuously prefaced by an Assassin's Creed style disclaimer stating: 1) it is an entertainment product and not 100% historically accurate, 2) the game was made by a diverse team of many different religious faiths, and 3) Don't Try This at Home. Unlike Mafia 2 and Mafia 3, the game doesn't really contain any "culturally sensitive topics or themes", and the only really noticeable references to religion are a shootout in a church and a single line making an oblique reference to Catholic fecundity. On the whole the disclaimer just seems like it's there because it's expected by the current cultural zeitgeist.
• Pistol-Whipping: The newly-added finishers of this game include Tommy bludgeoning his enemies with the butt and sides of his firearms.
• Regenerating Health: Added in the remake. If your health drops nearly to zero, you'll regenerate enough health to survive 1 or 2 bullets after waiting for several seconds, though you'll still need to find a medical station to recover the rest of your health.
• Reusable Lighter Toss: Tommy tosses a lighter into a pool of gas in a warehouse filled with red explosive barrels to finally finish off a lucky bastard that has escaped death in almost every other way.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The magnum revolver kills in 2-3 shots rather than 3-4 shots the Colt .45 pistol does, and is more accurate at the cost of holding one less bullet. Averted with the service revolver and pocket revolver, which are comparable to or weaker than the Colt .45 while holding less ammo.
• Rural Gangsters: While both the Salieri and Morello Crime Families are based in and mainly operate in the city of Lost Heaven, they also have notable rackets and businesses established in the countryside just outside the city. Two levels, "Ordinary Routine" and "A Trip to the Country", have Tommy, Paulie, and Sam fighting against the Morello's goons and Dirty Cops under their payroll when the latter two threaten their money collecting and bootlegging operations.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: In the mission "Better Get Used To It", Vincenzo hands over three baseball bats Sam acquired from a warehouse, ostensibly autographed by Babe Ruth. Vinnie scoffs the detail off as an obvious forgery, but admits that the bats themselves are still rather reliable.
• Shout-Out:
  • If Tommy visits Ralph while gearing up in "Better Get Used to It", he mentions that Sarah mentioned a new movie out about a guy in "your line of work", and that they might enjoy seeing it together; given the timeframe of the mission as November 1932, it's most likely Howard Hawks' Scarface, an enormous box office hit at the time and the blueprint for countless gangster films to follow. (Ironically, not only would a guy in the life like Tommy probably not appreciate it, but it was banned in Chicago, Lost Heaven's closest real-world counterpart.)
  • One Free Ride mission involves a bus rigged to explode if it drops below a certain speed.
• Shown Their Work: During the "Visiting Rich People" mission, if you understand Italian, you'll hear Salvatore telling you the painting you're looking for is on the 1st floor. However, to American audiences, the painting appears on the "2nd" floor of the house. This is because Europeans refer to the 1st floor as the "ground floor" while the 2nd floor is known as the "1st" floor (though if you somehow understand Italian, you'd probably already know that).
• Spared by the Adaptation: Lou and Dino, the two mobsters that chase Paulie and Sam at the beginning and later try and kill Tommy for helping them, survive at the beginning as they don't enter Salieri's bar like in the original game which led to them being killed. Instead they scarper when threatened with a shotgun by Paulie. It isn't clarified what happened to them when the Morello crime family was brought down.
  • Mikey Dunne, Salieri's preferred contestant in the big race, isn't murdered in a suspicious "accident" here, just roughed up badly enough to keep him from competing. This actually lines up with Don Salieri's comment that they can't kill the foreign ringer, Lichtenberg, for fear it'd be too suspicious; Morello, the guy with vastly more power, could've easily had Dunne rubbed out, but leaves him alive as a way to taunt Salieri, knowing how helpless he is.
• The Suffragette: Gender Bent with Hank Turnbull, whom Sarah eulogized after he was assassinated by Tommy on Salieri's orders.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Tommy is self-taught and not a trained soldier like Vito or Lincoln, and this shows in gameplay. Despite using the same melee combat as Mafia 3, the melee in this game is noticeably slower and clunkier, with Tommy's animations being more sluggish. Likewise, when it comes to gunplay, Tommy is noticeably less precise and accurate than Lincoln, especially at longer range or when blindfiring, and carries much less ammo. The player also can't see bullet trails in this installment, with the difficulty brought on by this being used to portray the struggling perspective of being in a shootout without military training.
  • After being locked in a solitary confinement for weeks without anybody visiting, Tommy eventually loses his sanity and begins to act erratic and violent.
• Take Cover!: The Definitive Edition uses a cover mechanic similar to the second and third games.
• Unfit for Greatness: Frank invokes this in regards to Paulie and Sam; Paulie is good in a fight, but lacks intelligence and common sense, while Sam is extremely loyal, but lacks ambition. Frank tells Tommy he's the most likely member of the organization to ascend to Don one day.
• Unseen No More: Tommy's daughter, who was frequently mentioned but never seen in the first game, is seen for the first time in this game.
• Uriah Gambit: The idea is discussed between Tommy, Paulie and Sam when they discover that they were smuggling black tar heroin. Paulie tells Tommy (while they're both alone) that they could have taken the fall and died in prison. This convinces Tommy that this trope may be inflicted upon him and his friends in some form or another to save the Don's skin if something goes wrong.
• Video Game Remake: This version is a modern HD remake of The City of Lost Heaven, remade from the ground up using many elements of the Mafia III engine, with a rewritten script and new actors.

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Remember that money, jobs, even best pals will come and go. But family? Family is forever.

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