It’s been over a year since I last played Mafia: The Old Country, and I quite enjoyed it back then thanks to its compact nature, decent combat and stealth mechanics, and, most importantly, its story. Suffice it to say, it ultimately became one of my favorite gaming experiences of 2025.
A year later, Hangar 13 has returned to the game with a new DLC, Man of Honor, which adds two more chapters to Enzo’s journey alongside additional content for Free Ride mode. There’s quite a bit here that fans of the original will appreciate, but let’s start with the elephant in the room: the story expansion.
Man of Honor takes place after Enzo Favara has earned his place within the Torrisi crime family. Rather than going further back into Enzo’s past, it fills in an earlier period of his time as a soldato while introducing Ennio Salieri, a character who will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played the first Mafia. Don Torrisi and Salieri have some history, and when the latter comes to him looking to settle a personal matter, the Don gives his approval and ropes Enzo and Cesare into helping him. Salieri’s ultimate goal is simple: earn enough money to leave Sicily behind and start a new life in America.
"There’s quite a bit here that fans of the original will appreciate"
As a result, Man of Honor places much more emphasis on Salieri than Enzo, with the latter essentially serving as the vehicle through which the expansion sets up Salieri’s future. The voice acting and cutscene direction are, as you would expect from a Mafia game, solid throughout. Salieri comes across as sharp, selfish and quick-witted, someone more than willing to use others to get what he wants, and that side of his personality is reflected throughout the expansion.
I won’t go too deeply into the story beyond saying that it’s a decent, if ultimately straightforward, tale built around one of the Mafia’s most fundamental rules: you don’t cross the Don. It wraps up rather quickly and respects your time, with a conclusion that is largely satisfying, even if much of what happens is fairly easy to see coming.
Lasting around two hours, Man of Honor feels, from a gameplay perspective, like a direct continuation of the base game. It delivers some excellent set pieces, including a chase sequence, several stealth sections, and action-heavy moments that eventually erupt into outright combat. If what you wanted was simply more Mafia: The Old Country, then Man of Honor provides exactly that, which also means it carries over both the strengths and shortcomings of the base experience.
Combat remains effective, though relatively simple and straightforward, while stealth once again follows the “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” approach. Even traversal remains familiar, whether you’re travelling on horseback or driving classic vehicles. Coincidentally, these are all things I enjoyed about the base game, so returning to them a year later was surprisingly satisfying. That said, if you didn’t enjoy The Old Country the first time around, there’s little here that will change your mind. This is an expansion rather than a major reworking of its mechanics. But for players who loved the base game, it provides an engaging afternoon’s worth of familiar Mafia gameplay without overstaying its welcome or pretending to be something radically different.
That is, until the compulsory instant-fail stealth sections come into play. There’s one particular set piece during the concluding events of Man of Honor where you simply cannot be detected, because the moment an enemy spots you, it’s an instant game over. Look, I get it, sometimes a game needs to impose a strict no-detection requirement, but the systems built around such a restriction also need to be engaging enough to justify it.
Take Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, for example, where the mechanics support those restrictions by giving you plenty of tools and gadgets to experiment with and work around different situations. In a game like Mafia, however, a section like this feels forced because the stealth mechanics simply aren’t deep enough to make that kind of limitation particularly enjoyable, and it ultimately pulled me out of the experience. Fortunately, this specific sequence only lasts for several minutes, but in an expansion this short, I still think it’s worth pointing out.
I also came across a few minor bugs here and there, including one during a chase sequence where Enzo’s animations suddenly went haywire and became stuck. It wasn’t anything game-breaking, but it did stand out, especially since I don’t recall encountering similar issues during my time with the base game.
Once you’re done with the story, Man of Honor also expands the game’s Free Ride mode with a number of Salieri-related missions, where he essentially acts as a quest giver to Enzo from his warehouse. To be transparent, I hadn’t experienced Free Ride before this since it was added after the game’s original release, but Salieri’s side tasks give the mode a little more narrative weight, especially since they provide additional background on his motivations and just how desperately he wants to make his way to America.
"Lasting around two hours, Man of Honor feels, from a gameplay perspective, like a direct continuation of the base game."
Again, these tasks largely follow the structure of missions from the base game, whether that means stealth-based infiltration, procuring valuable items, stealing vehicles, or completing the kinds of objectives you’ve already encountered throughout the campaign. The expansion also adds more weapons, knives, clothing options, and various items with effects that can influence combat encounters out in the field.
I like what Hangar 13 has done with Free Ride here, because it makes the world feel more worthwhile to explore by giving you more reasons to engage with it. My only question is whether some of this content could have been integrated more naturally into the story itself, which would have made the overall experience feel more connected. Regardless, Man of Honor improves Free Ride by making its existing world denser with engaging activities rather than simply increasing the size of the map.
For what it’s worth, Mafia: The Old Country – Man of Honor costs $9.99, which I think is a fair price for the experience it offers. There’s a reasonable argument that the expansion could have focused more on Enzo’s backstory rather than inserting a side story into the base game’s narrative, but I do feel that Hangar 13 is making an effort to connect The Old Country to the larger Mafia timeline, and so far, that approach is working well.
I appreciated Enzo’s characterization in the base game and would still love to see more added to his story if Hangar 13 has further content planned. As it stands, though, Man of Honor is a reasonable expansion of the base-game experience, sticking closely to what already worked rather than trying to reinvent it, and for an add-on of this size and price, that’s all it needs to do.
This game was reviewed on PC.
Excellent voice acting and cutscenes direction, Reasonable asking price, Free Ride content is worthwhile, Familiar The Old Country mechanics still work well.
Instant-fail stealth section, Story is predictable, Minor animation bug.
