8 Reasons Mafia 3 Is One 2016's Most Underrated Gems

6. Every Character Is Intelligently Written And Presented

From the get-go, you get the sense that 2K wanted to explore the 'human' side of various challenging subject matters. We see Father James struggling with the fact he betrayed his faith to help Lincoln out, before the game then drip-feeds in elements of his own past that frame why he's a priest in the first place.

The bog-standard 'Irish drunk' stereotype, Burke, has an incredible amount of depth to him that only hits you most likely after you've made a judgement based on the way he initially comes across.

Lincoln himself is given motivations that somewhat fall in line with that of Marvel's Punisher: the notion of "doing what needs to be done" for perhaps the wrong reasons, and the notion of slowly losing himself to that mentality in the process.

Point being, for as much as something like GTA IV wanted you to feel the lament in Niko for getting 'dragged' back into a world of crime, Rockstar never tackled it with any real weight or a more targeted script. Here, everyone from your mission-givers to the main villain are fleshed out and made to feel somewhat relatable, which is something you can't say about 90% of the other big-budget titles on the market.