2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quite helpful, January 12, 2003
This review is from: Mafia: Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Paperback)
This book is quite helpful to guide you through the missions of Mafia. However, I sometimes found myself wishing for more detail, especially on some of the maps. There are many things that happen off the in-game map and I would have liked to have seen those. This is especially true for things such as the race track that doesn't have a map at all. Sure, the map isn't in the game and they couldn't have just taken it from there, but hey, for things I can get straight out of the game, I do not have to buy a book for!
Overall, this is a pretty good book, and if I could, I'd probably give it 4 1/2 stars. But it's just not quite a 5.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Lacks any helpful information, December 31, 2010
The guide unfortunately lacks any information that could help overcome the difficult spots in the game, or gain further insight into the missions or alternate paths to solve them.
Early chapters start out nicely by giving an overview of the game world and mechanics, and more in-depth introductions of the characters than the game's manual. The campaign walkthrough though, which makes up the majority of the guide's pages, mostly wastes a lot of time with giving turn-by-turn instructions on how to reach the different locations in town--completely unnecessary given that the game points out the destinations, includes both a printed and an in-game map, and that the maps are reprinted again for every mission in the guide itself. There are precious few combat spots where the guide gives viable strategies, but mostly it fails to give any information about the different possibilities of approaching a mission, or any of the numerous tricks that one inevitably learns when retrying missions several times. Most information from the mission walkthroughs could be gleaned from examining the maps and missions from a static map editor, and are not really helpful in actually playing the missions at all.
This edition of the guide does, in contrast to the one for the PC version which poorly treated the optional subquests, free ride, and free ride extreme modes on a meagre 2 pages combined, spend a little more time on the car theft missions and alternate game modes, but they still feel more like an afterthought.
The guide overall feels more like summary of the game's missions than an actual playing guide. Apart from giving an important hint for when you are really stuck on a mission in terms of not even knowing where to go next or what to try and do, I think the helpfulness of this guide is very limited.
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