Mafia Wars Shakedown holds up the App Store for absolutely free

Well, that's not much of a holdup, now is it? Regardless, Mafia Wars Shakedown--or, as we like to call it: Mafia Wars Mobile: Take Three--is now available on the U.S. App Store for the cool price of "free". This next attempt at a suitable Mafia Wars game for mobile devices marks the first time Zynga has launched a full HTML5 game through the App Store.

And frankly, it looks downright slick when you consider it was built using HTML5, the web-based coding platform that Zynga has been less than bullish on before. Now, Mafia Wars Shakedown is the fourth HTML5-based game released by the developer, so we're going to guess Zynga is whistling a different tune by this point. According to a release, "Players are challenged to steal collection pieces from friends and strangers in order to earn powerful items and defeat bosses to level up from chump to Don."

But our very own in-depth preview can already tell you what the game is like. Based on that, it sounds like a fairly bare bones release that works well technically, but more importantly a number of features are already teased as "coming soon." The game's App Store page claims that players can steal from their friends live. So, we'd say Mafia Wars Shakedown is worth at least a try, if only to see what a Mafia Wars game looks like in real time.