You have to remember, that ultimately Mafia 2 was 1/3 of the game it was developed to be due to that games hellish development history.
It went from a great concept, to a linear, story driven, point a to be for 8 hours kind of game. Mafia 1 wasn't really like that. Mafia 3 isn't like that at all.
Mafia 3 is an unpolished open world sandbox game with a huge focus on story and characters and for the most part, it nails that. It suffers from lack of polish, performance issues and some kinda weird decisions overall, but it's a fun game overall.
