Unpopular opinion but I preferred Mafia 3 over 2. I don’t think any of them are great games, just solid ones.
Mafia 2’s story is good, but the game started to feel pretty repetitive for me quickly. “Get in car, drive somewhere listening to a conversation to move the story forward, shoot some people, repeat until game is over.”
Mafia 3 also feels repetitive, and can definitely start to feel grindy. But I think the main missions are better designed than 2, and the combat overall also feels better and more fun. So it’s a trade off: it’s an open world game so it’s got more filler to make it longer, but when it’s good it’s better than its predecessor (IMHO).
If they had added fast travel, it would have been a really solid game (to me, at least). The excruciatingly-long driving sessions were interminable, and it was this that made me abandon the game in the end, even though I was already about 2/3 of the way through it. The characters, acting and story were really good.
It's quite repetitive, but no more than any other middling open world game. I happen to enjoy stealthily murdering people with a giant combat knife, so the repetition didn't bother me. The constant criss-crossing around the map to go to/from objectives bothered me a lot. 90% of the checkpoints in each quest could have been a phone call.
I wonder if there's a mod that lets you teleport to map markers 🤔 If so, I would play the game again.
The map looks and feels amazing, one of my favourite worlds in a game, and the main story missions are really, really good
BUT
To unlock said story missions you have to do multiple hours of open world tasks, most of which consist of going to an area and mindlessly killing everybody. If you enjoy grinding, you will probably like it, I have a friend who does, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it because I found unlocking the story missions mind-numbing.
It's an okay game, but far worse than the first two. They forced an open world onto it, and made it pretty repetitive. The DLC is more linear and feels a lot more like a typical Mafia story telling.
Oh man I remember the open-world obsession era. It's still sort of with us, but a few companies are daring to stick with linear narratives that don't allow as many branching paths, like Control or Alan Wake 2. Even non-linear narratives are being pulled off in non-open-world games like Baldur's Gate 3.