Mafia Wars Facebook Review

This is a review of the popular application game on facebook, Mafia Wars.

This review takes a look at the popular Mafia Wars game on the social network Facebook. This game involves creating a Mafia, from your friends on Facebook, and you playing an intricate role in its development. Its major strengths are the game play and the multiplayer co-op. This game suffers in terms of graphics, it is a text based game, with few pictures compared to other games in its field. It also lacks a strong story line, another aspect present in many of its competing games. This review will take a look at the game from three aspects, Gameplay, Graphics, and then Multiplayer Co-Operation.

But first, we will take a look at a brief description of the game.

Mafia Wars is a simple text based number crunch game, that puts you in a Mafia with all of your friends (who play Mafia Wars, and add you to their Mafia). A player starts out by doing jobs, with energy, for cash and moves up to buying properties for sustained income. The player then uses this income to buy bigger and better weapons from the inventory screen, which then can give them the upper hand in multiplayer fights. 

As the player does more jobs, they earn experience that allows them to go up levels. As a player goes up in levels, they gain more profile points which allows them to become stronger, and to better fight rival Mafia groups.  As I said earlier, pretty standard. What sets this game apart from the crowd, is in its multiplayer co-operation, and a few gameplay aspects.

Gameplay rating = 7

While strong gameplay basics help this game become a winner, it suffers from some minor hold ups.

Graphics rating = 6

A text based game always suffers in this category. This one especially, since it lacks specific pictures for each mission. It has one redeeming quality, but even that, is lacking.

Multiplayer Co-Operation = 9

Fun cooperation between you and your friends on facebook is what really propels this game. That really is the reason to play a game like this.

Total = 7.33

While this game turns out to be fun, I would not have played it to that point had I not been creating this review. Now, I can't seem to stop. Ok, well maybe I can, but the game is pretty fun.

For more in depth discussion about each category and the game in general, check out each detailed section below.

Gameplay Rating 7

Mafia Wars gets off to a slow start. That really is one of its weaknesses. And rather than introduce you to a story line, that would capture a player and cause them to want to keep playing, the makers of this game pretty much let you stumble around to figure everything out. While they do offer a how to play section, it is pretty limited in terms of strategy, and telling you how this game differs from others like it.

Once you do figure out how to play the game and get your stats up however, the game becomes a bit more interesting.

Mafia Wars on Facebook has several cool aspects.

First of all, as a maniac, (the class I would recommend) your energy recharges relatively fast. This means that logging in multiple times during the day to play, rather than a morning nighttime ritual. This is great for someone who has quite a bit of time on their hands.

Another aspect to the game that I liked, was that it allows you travel from section to section without penalty. I really like this feature, because unlike some games, where traveling from one location to another to do missions, (only to find out that those missions cost more than you remembered) can cost you hours, and really slows down the game. Mafia Wars relies on the tiers to move users from one section to another, and lets you quickly check out your options and make the most informed choice on where to spend your energy. This was a good move by the developers.

The "jobs" are experience gaining missions. This means, when you do a job, you gain experience overall, and within the context of doing that job. If you fill the experience bar for a mission, you gain a profile point, and if you fill all experience bars for a tier of missions, (ie Street Thug) you gain access to level two of those missions. As you fill the tiers, a player gains special items. This is a really inventive way to re-use the same missions, which would otherwise get boring, and reward the player for doing those missions. This is shown in the screenshot below.

Things that I found missing or not up to par within gameplay in Mafia Wars were as follows.

A cohesive story line. It is my opinion, that text based games should rely heavily on story, as reading is a large portion of the game. Mafia wars should have more of a story line, than "He beat up your uncle, so its time for payback." These cliche lines do not help this game, and the game would be greatly improved if there was a story page, where all these lines could be pieced together, to form a story a player could follow. Perhaps we could even be intrigued into playing more? 

A lack of ways to gain Godfather points. These are points that allow the user special privileges within the game. You can gain them (sparingly) through missions, and through buying them from Zynga. I understand that Zynga has got to make a living. But you need to give the user more of a taste of what Godfather points can buy, and make it worth their while to contribute. Other games that I have contributed to, followed this code, and earned my dough.

Graphics Rating 6

A text based game always leaves something to be desired in the graphics section of the game. Mafia Wars is no exception to the rule, in fact, if the rule had not been created already, I would say that Mafia Wars created that rule. There are no individual pictures for the jobs, and only small graphics for the properties and guns. Large photos representing your character as he moves through the tiers would have been a nice touch, and upgrading each tier photo as you move up the levels would have been even cooler. But this game has none of that. Instead, it is marred with an almost ugly title bar, and cheesy graphics only showing up when the user exerts major effort.

The boss fights were a nice touch to the game. They are interactive, meaning when you enter a boss fight, the decision is not already made, you decide how you would like to fight. The game allows you to use items you have picked up during the missions, to attack more, or to run. This interactivity, is really cool. (Just like it was when I played Pok'emon) But again, it lacks in style. It would be cool to see the boss picture react to what you are doing, or how the battle is going. This lack of interactivity detracts from the overall styling of the game, and leaves the player wishing for more.

"Yay! I won the fight! But he still looks the same..."

Multiplayer Rating 9

This is by far Mafia Wars's greatest strength. Allowing users to connect and play a game within a social network is a great way to connect with friends. You and your friends (or office buddies) already have the same template for a game, and it already is a place where all types of friends gather. It literally is gold, when talking about trying to reach an audience.

Mafia Wars allows a large amount of cooperation between you and your Mafia. It allows you to select users as your top mafia, which helps you, and helps them. They get rewards when you accomplish tasks, and in turn the best players often help you accomplish tasks that you couldn't do on your own.

The larger your mafia, the better off you are in fights as well. The more mafia members you have, the more weapons you use in a fight. Having a large mafia, can allow you to dominate other players who are actually stronger than you. This makes for the focus to shift from playing through the jobs, to recruiting more powerful mafia members. There are several groups on facebook dedicated to this, easy mafia recruits ect. A player can easily grab more members fro those places if they need them.

The only thing keeping this category from being a ten is the lack of direct cooperation. While assigning members to your top mafia is cooperation, it is indirect at best. Again when a player clicks on the main menu to help out another member of their Mafia, (I am not even sure if this is co-op or just a bonus the game gives you) it is indirect at best. There should be missions, that require you and a gathering of people from your mafia to all do the same mission. This would be like raids on World of Warcraft, but less time intensive, and just be a fun way to add cooperation. 

Mafia Wars is a fun game. It has several great aspects, decent gameplay and tries hard to make up for lousy graphics. If you are into Mafia themed games and have yet to try a text based game, this might be for you. If you are looking for a minor distraction throughout the day, something to look forward to doing on your breaks, this game might be what you are looking for. But as far as free text based games go, there are many choices, and this game would not be my favorite.

I hope you enjoyed my review, my username here on hubpages, is gregorymjason. Check out my page and other games that I have reviewed! Perhaps you will find your next gaming addiction on my page!

While Mafia Wars has many strengths, it is still far from being the best game on the Facebook market.

I prefer Bloodlines, a vampire based text game, check out my review for that game here.

Facebook, the social networking site can be found here.

Zynga Games, including Mafia Wars, can be found here.

Author Gregorymjason, can be found by following that link.