These Video Game Difficulty Spikes SUCK!

If there is one section that is most definitely designed to turn you from a Goodfella into a sad one it's the goddam salt in the eye racing experience that makes up Mafia's "Fair Play" mission. Here you need to strap into one of the most high-tech race cars of the time and go up against the best in a test of your mettle that's going to require you to be heavy on the pedal.

It's just a shame that "high-tech racecar" here actually means "something the Little Rascals knocked up in Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts" because the thing handles like a !*$% bathtub more than a Bugatti. Plus it's about as resilient as taking cardboard armor to a very passionate knife fight, meaning that even if you were driving well and avoided all other racers like the plague, you could still end up buckling your own wheels and coming in dead last.

Things wouldn't be so bad if you just had to finish the race, but seeing as Mafia clearly has an inferiority complex, you have to win the race in order to proceed, meaning you're going to be spending a lot of time in a mission which is a literal pit stop to your fun. I want to be out on the streets acting like the Don, not spending time looking like a Dick.

On the one hand, we should praise the devs for trying to add some variety into their game, but to make this absolute clanger of a mission mandatory when the racing mechanics are THIS BAD, makes me want to cut said hand off and slap those responsible with it.

Even the recent remaster couldn't fix all the issues with this skid mark of a mission, and it still remains one of the standout difficulty spikes that mars an otherwise brilliant title.