Mafia Wars

Mafia Wars is a Flash-based game by Zynga, Inc., available through Face Book. It's the company's second most popular game behind Farmville. You play a gangster who must rise through the ranks of The Mafia by performing jobs, collecting gear, taking over businesses, recruiting members, and fighting with rival Mafias. Through these actions, you earn money and Experience Points; XP is used to advance your Character Level, which unlocks new content and gives you additional points to spend to raise your stats. It's billed as an RPG, but contains no action elements whatsoever; the game's interface is simply a series of screens and buttons that you click on to perform the desired task.

The game has a timing element, in that your Energy (used to perform jobs), Stamina (used to fight and rob), and Health (depleted when you fight) refill on a timer, encouraging you to log in as soon as they are full to maximize your XP and cash income. Similarly, your businesses generate income on fixed timers ranging from every hour to every 72 hours, and many other actions such as gifting, requesting and providing help with jobs, etc. reset on a daily basis.

The social aspect of the game comes into play in that your ability to fight other Mafias is directly related to how many members your own Mafia has; these may consist of friends you recruit through Face Book or "Hired Guns" that you buy with reward points. You can exchange gifts with your Mafia to complete collections and help with jobs, request and receive aid to perform jobs, send and receive Energy Packs, and even go to war with each other for fun and XP. There's also a "Hitlist" challenge where you try to stay alive as long as possible with everyone else gunning for you.

The game is divided into different mission areas, each with its own structure and unique challenges. All players start in New York (considered the "home city"), and the other locations become unlocked as you gain levels. The current locations are New York, Las Vegas, Italy, Brazil, and most recently (as of this writing), Chicago. Four former locations, Cuba, Moscow, Bangkok and Atlantic City (The last of which was exclusive to the mobile version of the game), are now closed, with no word from the developers if they will be reopened.

Like all Zynga games, Mafia Wars is entirely free to play, but you are encouraged to spend money to buy "reward points", which can be spent at the in-game Marketplace to purchase everything from skill points to energy refills to "limited edition" loot to additional Mafia members. Otherwise, they trickle in at the miserly rate of one every other level.

There is also a Mafia Wars iPhone app by Zynga, but it's a self-contained version that does not link to the Face Book game.

A sequel, Mafia Wars 2, is in development, which judging from the gameplay footage revealed so far, adds graphics and action gameplay by adding features from other Zynga games such as Frontier Ville and City Ville, and Real Time Strategy elements as seen in games such as Commandos and Desperados.

This game provides examples of:
"Cool guys don't look at explosions."
 * AKA 47: Lots; if a gun is not given its real name or generic name (like semi auto pistol), then it is given fake names. For example, RA-92 (AK-74) and Garza 9 (Glock 17).
 * Altitis: The game is much easier when your fellow Mafia members help you with things such as job help and gifting. The temptation to create alternate accounts to help oneself with these tasks is quite great.
 * More traditionally, some players create multiple accounts simply to try out different play styles (for instance, an energy-driven account based around doing jobs versus a stamina-driven account based around fighting).
 * Anti Poop Socking: When you're out of Energy, Stamina, and Energy Packs, you have to wait for them to refill. Of course, you can always get around this by spending lots of money at the Marketplace.
 * Artistic License History: The second Brazilian 'secret district', El Dorado, was released shortly after Zynga's Adventure World game, which featured El Dorado as a major plot point. Naturally, there was bound to be someone out there who thought that Zynga had invented the concept of El Dorado themselves.
 * Badass Biker: Red Jackson.
 * Boss Battle: Featured on the second, third, and fourth mission tiers in New York, but seemingly forgotten about afterwards... until the Vegas expansion, where they are featured heavily.
 * Bribing Your Way to Victory: The game can be played entirely for free, but spending money allows you to buy Reward Points, which let you buy the best items and advance much, much faster than without them. Also, everything can be bought instantly with Reward Points - even building time.
 * Cosmetic Award: The Achievement system, although you do get a single stat point for each one, and your friends can get nice rewards if you share them.
 * Curb Stomp Battle: When the list of potential fighters is made, Mafia size isn't taken into account. Very good news if you're the one with 501 members, otherwise...
 * Death Is a Slap On The Wrist: Getting "killed" merely costs you a bit of XP and cash (if you have any on hand) and increases your death count.
 * Difficulty Spike: Fighting and stamina are essential to getting through Vegas, so if you've powered through the other cities by putting all of your skill points in energy, the fighting jobs and boss fights in Vegas will hand you your ass on a platter.
 * Dissimile/Metaphorgotten: The "Embezzle Political Funds: Part 1" mission set has one Michelle Paulis telling you "Basically, we have our fingers in the cookie jar already, just need someone to move the cookies. And by 'cookies', I mean 'millions of dollars'."
 * Dragon Lady: One Bangkok level features a gang led by a female oyabun, and you assassinate her on the very last job.
 * Experience Points: As stated above, earned by fighting, doing jobs, and sometimes by helping other players.
 * Follow the Leader: There's a large number of other Facebook games that are essentially Recycled in Space versions of Mafia Wars, some of which are also made by Zynga.
 * Game Breaking Bug: Thanks to a bug, Red Jackson used to be pretty much impossible to beat on the Ruby mastery level. Before you can attack her directly, you have to kill her two henchmen. However, it used to be the case that even if you'd killed them, a bug would still cause one of them to register as being alive, preventing you from doing more than a miniscule amount of damage against the boss. And not only that, on occasion she would also inexplicably heal herself during battle. Though Jackson is still very hard, the bug thankfully appears to have been fixed now.
 * Another bug briefly caused some of the Italy bosses to have hit points in the millions. This was very quickly remedied.
 * Global Currency Exception: Each region set has its own currency that doesn't carry over between regions, so your $4,000,000,000 bankroll in New York does you no good in Cuba (or Las Vegas, for that matter), and such. In Las Vegas, you can upgrade your vault in order to convert other regions' currency to Vegas money, but the conversion rates are horrible, you can only convert a limited amount of cash per day, and it's strictly a one way conversion - you can ONLY produce Vegas chips this way, nothing else.
 * Gotta Catch Them All: The collections... dear gods, the collections. Some of them give very good rewards, too, encouraging obsessive job farming.
 * Hyperspace Arsenal: It is possible to carry around unlimited supplies of weapons, armor pieces, vehicles, and animals. True, only 501 of each are able to be used at one time, but still...
 * In Universe Game Clock: The game updates in real time. There are no particular consequences for not logging in, except that you may miss chances at additional XP and money, and your businesses can get robbed.
 * Lethal Joke Item: Lots.
 * Level Grinding: Over, and over, and over, and over, at least partly because of...
 * Level Up Fill Up: Your energy, stamina, and health are restored to max whenever you level up.
 * Lost Forever: Many top-level items are only available by doing limited-time missions. Cuba, Moscow, Bangkok and Atlantic City have been removed from the game.
 * The Mafia: Exactly What It Says On the Tin.
 * The Mafiya: Featured in the Moscow mission set.
 * Marathon Boss: The San Juan bosses. On the highest level of mastery, they have insane amounts of HP and take tons of stamina to defeat. You're given four hours for the highest level boss fights, and you will need almost every second.
 * Mob War: The rationale for the fighting aspect of the game.
 * Money for Nothing: Once you start buying businesses, your cash income increases exponentially. Too bad there's nothing left to spend all those billions of dollars on. The game Lampshades this with achievements for depositing large amounts of cash in the bank, such as $1 trillion.
 * The exception is Bangkok, which features a faction store with some really powerful items you can spend your spare Baht on. The downside is that mission-required items in Bangkok are so expensive, it'll probably be a while before you reach the point where you have expendable cash. Las Vegas also has a very tight cash budget.
 * More Criminals Than Targets: Implied; literally everyone in the game is a member of some organized crime group or another. Sure, the missions say you're doing things like robbing banks, eluding the FBI, etc., but no economy could conceivably survive all this crime.
 * Nerf: Done from time to time to counteract game breaking tactics or to simply balance the game or keep certain aspects from being too heavily exploited. The most common Nerf is tweaking energy required/experience payout for certain jobs which energy-based players were using to power level.
 * Noodle Implements: Figuring out just WHY you need a $12,000 tracksuit to intimidate someone or why questioning a captured spy requires 30 SUVs can be the most fun part of the game.
 * The Dublin challenge mission might be the funniest example yet. Somehow, all of the tasks (rob the bank, kidnap the bank president's family) are accomplished with pints of stout.
 * Point Build System: Character levels, job mastery levels, and achievements give you points to spend to upgrade your stats.
 * Precision F Strike: Courtesy of Snoop Dogg during the live event leading up to the explosion of an armored truck.
 * Randomly Drops: Jobs, robbing, fighting, the Daily Chance game... most of the rewards are randomized, from gear to collection items.
 * The Triads and The Tongs: Featured in the Bangkok mission set.
 * Unflinching Walk: Lampshaded in the Vegas missions.


 * Viva Las Vegas
 * Yakuza: Alluded to in the New York mission set, and featured prominently in the Bangkok mission set.