After having about 1 or 2 districts to go I am playing almost begrudgingly at this point. The insanely rote and repetitive gameplay wears thin in the first 10 hours and gets worse as you grind on without any significant change to the formula. It's like they spent 16 months building that excellent intro and then someone from publishing burst in through the doors and said "this needs to be on shelves in 3 months!" and they had to scramble to get it finished.
I love open world games. I enjoy most of the Assassins Creed, had a ton of fun in Sleeping Dogs and even really enjoyed pretty much everything Watch_Dogs had to offer. That said Mafia 3 just takes it several steps too far. It's a solid 3/5 but anything above that is being really, really generous. Unless you really get into the setting or story the gameplay does not in any way support it throughout your stay.
Mafia 2 was criticized for it's lack of open world activities but man I would vastly prefer if Mafia 3 followed the same structure of story mission after story mission than this checklist approach they went with.
Unlike Mafia 3 which doesn't convey its setting and themes through gameplay, Mafia 2 lacked content and open world activities because it was trying to show America as a land not so opportunistic. You just do tasks for people that are boring and menial, or are violent and criminal. It's a world that looks like it has opportunities, only to begrudgingly take it from you. The American Dream.
Mafia 3 just doesn't fucking do that. It thinks Mafia is about good voice acting, cutscenes, and mature themes. Those things are important, sure, but in a video game you just can't tell, you have to show. Show us these things in gameplay, show us these things in the mission structure and world design.
Another big issue is with PC frame-rates. If you unlock the frame rate by deactivating vsync, anything above 60 causes animations to hasten and skip frames. Example:
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