Mafia City

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Mafia City

"That's how mafia works."
— Charles, the level 35 Boss

Genre(s):	Strategy, city management
Platform(s):	Android iOS
Release Date:	March 30, 2017
Engine:	Unity
Developer(s):	Yotta Games
Publisher(s):	Yotta Games
Country:	China

Mafia City: War of Underworld (commonly known as Mafia City for short) is a freemium city-building and crew management simulator game developed and published by indie Chinese mobile game studio Yotta Games for Android and iOS on March 30, 2017.

The game gained popularity in early 2019 after the ads for the game became memes. It received sarcastically positive reviews first, then negative reviews after the meme died due to the game being falsely advertised.

Why It's A Level 1 Crook

Misleading title: the developer intentionally named the game Mafia City and used a similar logo to 2K's Mafia series to trick people into believing that it was a spin-off of the Mafia franchise.
Ugly graphics that make it hard to see which members of your mafia crew are still alive during turf wars. The map is isometric, but the characters and vehicles are orthographic.
This game has multiple instances of asset theft, making the game an asset thief.
- The image used for the machine gunner's Jeep is an image of a toy car stolen from Google Images.
- One of the voice clips used for the black guy when you tap on him, is stolen from a character named King Muscle from the game Ultimate Muscle: Legends vs. New Generation.
- Many of the voice clips used for the shirtless gangster guy when you tap on him are stolen from Rick Hunter and Corey Cruise's voice lines from the Postal series.
- When the Yakuza crossover event was here, the Yakuza characters appeared in the game. But the Yakuza characters just look like they were taken from the official artwork of Yakuza.
The game sexualizes and treats the women (or "Babes" as they're called) as if they are nothing more than maids, sex slaves, and prostitutes, for your character. However, it can be said that it's because the game exploits the crime life (poorly).
Horrible breathing animations for all the characters, the worst offenders being the Babes.
- Speaking of which, the Babes' breasts bounce like Haydee's breasts when they're breathing for some reason.
The female mafiosos try way too hard to be badass and sexy at the same time by deliberately wearing skintight stockings and either cleavage-baring or outright skimpy outfits while wielding heavy machine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and light machine guns. They all fail in both departments too.
The game tries way too hard to be edgy and serious with its excessive use of profanity, drug usage, violence, and sex, similar to the Grand Theft Auto series, and fails at even executing them properly.
The game is notorious for flooding over 1 hour and 35 minutes worth of ads into every single social media platform (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, you name it), free apps, and free games that you can think of in an attempt to get people to play the game.
- Speaking of ads, every single one has very ugly and amateurish animations and is completely nothing like the real game.
  - The ads on Facebook have narcissistically referred to it as "the best game of the year" since 2017, despite Minecraft (worldwide) and Genshin Impact/[Honkai Impact 3rd] (only in China, as Mafia City is made in China, despite Genshin Impact launching in 2020) being the best for phones.
  - The ads feature unrealistic actions perpetrated by gangsters that don't fit the crime life, such as gang members getting money by shooting up a bank entrance, a gangster leveling up whenever his henchmen bow to him, and a police officer turned into a briefcase when he gets hit by a prisoner.
Even the ads themselves have stolen game assets in them, most notably characters such as Sam Fisher from Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Buck Hughes from Far Cry 3, and even Alyx from Half-Life 2. Other stolen assets include a low-resolution Star Junction ripped from Grand Theft Auto IV and vehicles from various CGI sites.
- In fact, it also engages in asset flipping, as all the ads are rendered in Unity (which in addition to game development is also used as animation software). One example is the Mafia boss taken from the Men In Suits Pack found on the asset store.
Lots of progression, weapons, training, and upgrades are locked behind paywalls just like Dungeon Keeper, making the game pay-to-win. Additionally, you have to wait a long time for the upgrades and training to be completed.
Terrible optimization, in which the game will lag and crash after playing the game for a few minutes, and it will make your phone hot and the battery will drain a lot.
The bikers have a hilariously awkward animation where they'd flail their lever-action shotguns up and down in numerous failed attempts to recreate the T-800's iconic one-handed shotgun spin.
The characters' voices are frequently out of sync with their dialogue and they frequently say different things apart from their dialogue.
One YouTube commenter pointed out that the gunners' training building resembles an American school, which can be very offensive to school shooting survivors.
Very awful sound quality, some of the audio representation could bring Flash games to mind.
- Speaking of the awful sound quality, some of the sounds are very inconsistent in quality. Some sounds are in 44100HZ, while most of them are in 16000HZ.
A sequel to this game called Grand Mafia, is nothing more than a reskin of this game. But at least it has better sound quality, the voice acting was removed, and has a 3D animated intro.
The Yakuza crossover event, is terrible. For example, the Yakuza characters are locked behind a paywall. Costing hundreds of dollars just to get a character from the series.

Redeeming Qualities

Nice music in the form of Pump by Valentino Khan. Too bad that you can only hear it once you reach Level 100.
The game's ads can be very entertaining and funny to watch.
Grand Mafia's opening intro looks pretty good, as the character models look good for a mobile game, and the animation while not all the way perfect is decent. Despite this, however, this is the only part of the game that is good.

Trivia

On Swagbucks, if you grind up till Mansion 20, you will get $100.
Yotta Games have acknowledged the meme, as seen in one of their ads where they refer it to as "the first 2019 meme".

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Mafia City

Contents

Why It's A Level 1 Crook

Redeeming Qualities

Trivia

Videos

Comments

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Mafia City

Why It's A Level 1 Crook

Redeeming Qualities

Trivia

Videos

Comments

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