Lincoln Clay kills a lot of people. He shoots them. He slices their throats and stabs their eyes with a combat knife. He collapses their windpipes with the stock of a shotgun. Those he particularly has it out for meet even worse ends. One is killed by having a noose wrapped around his neck and attached to the car of an ascending Ferris wheel. Another is tied to a cross and set afire. One rival mobster is dropped off at a lieutenant’s bar to be tortured to death in a supply closet. Mafia III is full of nastiness—the kind of violence that, even within the context of videogames, still has the power to shock. It’s a brutal game about brutal people that never wants the player to feel fully comfortable enacting the routine atrocities that define most shooters. And, because of all this, it makes killing gratifying in a way that’s rare for games. The plot’s set-up is spartan: Lincoln Clay has just returned to New Orleans surrogate New Bordeaux from the Vietnam War. It’s 1968 in the American South and Lincoln is a Black man wearing an olive green army jacket and combat boots. His family, itself a part of New Bordeaux’s criminal tapestry, owes money to Don Salvatore “Sal” Marcano, who promises to call things even if Lincoln helps his crew pull a quick heist. Marcano fucks Lincoln over, killing almost everyone he loves, and puts a bullet in his head. Lincoln doesn’t die. He recuperates. He buzzes his hair close to the scalp, a pink ridge of angry keloid running across his temple showing the world that he’s unstoppable, and gets to work systemically dismantling the Italian mafia. Lincoln is unquestionably criminal, but, within Mafia III’s underground milieu—quickly established to be run by human traffickers, Klan members, and crooked politicians—he’s the kind of criminal the player can get behind. Mafia III doesn’t need to spend more time than its opening act to hang a sympathetic frame around Lincoln’s later actions. He’s a guy who arrives home from an appalling war to see his entire life destroyed by those whose greed and racism forms the power structure of his city. His bid to overthrow these people is centred on the clear bulls eye of Sal Marcano, but is indirectly aimed, by association, at the very fabric of the American South of the late ‘60s, too. Any player with a cursory understanding of 20th century American history can add that horrific context to the game’s plot. Of course Lincoln is angry. Of course he’s going to kill as violently as he does. We want him to. Setting out into New Bordeaux, choking and stabbing and shooting and burning Marcano’s foot soldiers, is an act of cathartic revenge. Lincoln is Prince Hamlet and Django Freeman; Titus Andronicus and John Rambo. As he works up the ranks of his enemies toward the shining prize of a Marcano lieutenant’s location, the act of sneaking through their operations, wrecking business infrastructure and littering buildings with bloodied corpses, becomes one of many minor battles. Finding those who head up the rackets and taking them out assumes greater dramatic form, an almost Shakespearean proportion of justice meted out with a gory tangibility that makes Lincoln’s war against the world around him seem winnable. Every assassination target butchered is an appropriately gratifying “fuck you” to the power structures of 1960s Louisiana; each mangled body left to rot in back alleys and factory buildings an attempt to give Lincoln back the power that his society has tried to take from him. Lincoln’s new supporters—his informants and the lieutenants he recruits to assume control of neighbourhoods he’s wrenched from Marcano’s control—have all been wronged, too. Alma Diaz is a Cuban refugee with an anti-Castro background, Emmanuel Lazare escaped Papa Doc Duvalier’s Haitian secret police, Vito Scaletta was put to pasture after being manipulated by the mob in Mafia II, Thomas Burke had to leave Northern Ireland as a young man because his father was a member of the IRA. Even kindly, peaceful Father James—the angel on Lincoln’s shoulder—was put through the wringer, forced to prove himself on the battlefields of Second World War France as part of an all Black unit segregated from, and looked down upon by, the white American military. All of these stories, except in Lincoln’s case, are understated, simply presented as how things are through offhand lines in character biographies or dialogue. Nearly everyone in the game might be a criminal whose actions are hard to defend, but, within the context of a pulp revenge story, we root for them as agents of restitution. In an assassination plan that involves sinking a riverboat—a great symbol of the Old South itself—the rich attendees of the lavish political fundraiser being held aboard tread water in the river they had just been floating upon. As Lincoln fights his way across the boat, panicked screams begin. Alligators froth the water all around, wrestling the upper classes down into the dark water, literally eating the rich. A scene like this is horrifying, sure, but, more importantly, it’s immensely cathartic. Mafia III is largely blunt in its messaging yet its conclusion is deliberately tragic. The game reminds players that violence begets violence, a simple enough point to make, but one that always takes on greater weight when set within powerful, resounding moments in history. The mobsters Lincoln kills will be replaced by other mobsters, including those whom the game takes plenty of time to depict as brutally violent killers, happy to torture their enemies. Nobody gets out of the game with a clear conscience. The story makes it clear that Lincoln compromises something in his righteous vengeance, but is never cowardly enough to suggest that he isn’t justified all the same. Mafia III understands that power structures are built from forces larger than individual desire—that social and political systems snowball into self-perpetuating horror of the kind that provides a nightmarish logic to the apparent chaos of a city-wide murder spree. At the game’s end, once Lincoln’s revenge is complete and Father James realizes that all the peaceful urgings in the world can’t stop what’s been set in motion, The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” fades in. The song’s a ‘60s aesthetic cliché at this point, but Mafia III isn’t afraid to bend stereotype and convention to its own purpose. It twists the familiar framework of the revenge story to discuss the ways in which structural inequality grinds the oppressed down. It embraces genre tropes to enhance the cultural weight of a Black Vietnam veteran wreaking havoc on post-war Louisiana. In “Sympathy for the Devil,” it sums up its protagonist, letting the lyrics back up the violent actions of a man who’s had enough.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and editor based in Toronto. His work has appeared in Kill Screen, Playboy, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.