Kind of finished two, Turmoil and my replay of Mafia III.
Turmoil was addictive but in a braindead way, the kind that saps your energy and doesn't really give anything back to you. I suppose you could in some sense call it a roguelike, just in that it's one where you play campaigns of it. You're drilling oil. You're dragging pipes. You're uncovering reserves. You're on a short time table to do it with the decision to manage debt (to start up faster), auctions for land, and stuff. In the end it's all shallow as a puddle. Fun to pull up a single game (and good that they included that option, kind of makes me wish that games like Spelunky and FTL had some sort of quickplay, do just one level/battle option) and just try to efficiently drill, but it's pretty unimpressive all told. Definitely isn't worth full price. The whole thing just feels like a cheap ass Flash game, and petty as this may sound, the description of the upgrades makes that case for me. You don't invent a specific drilling technology, for example, it's just "Speed 2" "makes you drill through rock faster" type stuff.
Now, Mafia III was a massive disappointment and I actually gave up on it and uninstalled. Broke my heart. I've praised it to high heaven around here on two grounds. One was that the story was really, really good, and the other was that it had a much better treatment of racial conflict than Red Dead 2. However, it seems that I just overlooked a lot of obnoxious stuff in it the first time. It came out way back in 2016, during clown world but before the Great George Floyd Apocalypse.
Gameplay wise we all know the story, it was GTA mixed with Far Cry with no meaningful side content, you just knock over outposts (not labeled like that, but it's functionally what they are) until you get to do a good mission. I liked the gunplay a lot, still do. No complaints. The stealth is the bare minimum you can have and call it a stealth game, I liked it my first time because I had no taste but realize it's total piss now. The cars, they're a mixed bag. You have this system where it auto aims and your own tires can be shot out. Unfortunately, they're shot out almost immediately in every chase. Overall the cars are pretty disappointing for a 1960s-1970s (it's set in 68, but the late 60s feel like the 70s) game. That was an era that (if I remember correctly) had a lot of classic Hollywood car chases, muscle cars jumping bridges type nonsense, and this would have been the perfect setting to play into that. Black Dukes of Hazzard vibe, basically. You don't get that, the cars barely matter.
In terms of progression, it's genuinely tedious if you do everything, but if you only do the minimum you need to its not. The problem is that this requires the player to GAMBLE on what is worth seeing and what isn't. I also hate that it tends to make you do each big setpiece racket location twice (once to get intel and a second time to take over). I think they probably intended for this to be a way to let you both stealth and shoot it up, but that didn't occur to me until way too late as I knew I didn't want to bother with stealth because there were no interesting tools or mechanics.
Story, your Black gang got fucked over by the New Orleans Mob and your character, a Vietnam SOG commando that has returned home enlists the help of his MACV CIA spook (no, not that kind of spook, the other kind) to tear it all down bit by bit. There's this really cool mixture of documentary bits (some with real photos and footage to give it a sense of reality, like how For All Mankind would repurpose historical stuff) that give lore, movie-like scenes with the antagonists for dramatic irony, just super stylish. It's absolutely fantastic. Now, the story missions I praised to high heaven? Some of them are awesome and others are just there. The good ones are a shootout in an abandoned theme park where you lynch a cracker, a shootout at a Klan rally where you burn a Klansman on his own cross, the final shootout, the bank heist in Mardi Gras, crashing/sinking and having a shootout on a paddleboat in the bayou, and... that's all I can really remember that's truly unique. It's got super memorable moments interspersed with lots of filler, and the problem is, some of the big boss villains feel, themselves, like filler.
In comparison to Mafia DE and Mafia II (which I recently played, and found I liked Mafia II a lot more this time), you lose the sense of reality. Those games were, thanks to being much more linear (Mafia II had no real open world, it was equivalent to LA Noire in that regard), also much more meaningfully paced, they had a sense of the passage of time, they had a sense that your character exists in a real world, and that world was interactable. Mafia III doesn't just cut the shops and stuff (and they're still there, marked out on the map, suggesting they DID intend to have them at one point), its NPCs are totally wooden. They will casually walk by a corpse and not react. A giant fucking shootout will attract no police and cause no panic as long as it's on arbitrary gang ground. And the story, cool as its presentation is, as its whole high concept is, is a lot more formulaic and repetitive.
What ultimately killed it for me was just the depiction of the South. My position on it in the past is that it just portrays its race war matter-of-factly, it doesn't really have many or any good White Southern characters but it doesn't really demonize the area either, outside of two particularly stupid parts of the story. But I was missing a ton of environmental details, background stuff, stuff I did notice the first time but forgot. Obnoxious subtext about BLM and jabs at "privileged" Southerners.
The biggest elephant in the room is the Klan being allied with the Mafia. The game uses real Mafia lore (Santo Trafficante JFK assassination conspiracy theory) but it ahistorically depicts the CATHOLIC ITALIAN Mafia being on the Klan's side instead of, as they historically were, a proxy of the US government to UNDERMINE the Klan. The irony is that they could have had a Mafia game about dismantling the Klan and still had the character be Mafia, and had it be more accurate. Instead it's off in fantasyland. But whatever, let's say. These are the donut steal OC Southern Union, a Catholic Klan, and they're pro-Mafia. Well, they also run fucking slave trafficking rings in the 1960s, because that was how eeeeevil White Southerners were at that time, it's totally a thing that was a big deal in 19-goddamn-68. The Klan just makes my head hurt here, in real life they were obnoxious moralists who terrorized people that didn't fall in line with WASP morality. Their depiction as being in bed with these libertine guido degenerates strikes at the heart of everything the Klan was.
Dumb as that is, though, it's topped by the Dixie Mafia, who the big boss in town gives the Black neighborhood to for no fucking reason, then open up brothels specifically selling Black women to peckerwoods. Because that makes a lot of sense. Gangbangers always gangbang in OTHER ETHNIC GROUP'S neighborhoods. Having the equivalent of an occupying army that has to commute from the bayou to do this around a hostile population makes a ton of sense. And who winds up in charge after you lynch chief peckerwood? A sassy Haitian revolutionary woman that constantly bitches about everything. Burke and Vito feel like real people. Cassandra feels like something a retarded Millennial would come up with. She feels like something that should have been in Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. And of course after getting rid of the racist jungle-themed bar they turn it into a classy jazz club, and instead of selling heroin to the Negro they sell heckin' wholesome weed.
Because Haitians, of all the people in this world, are the most known for their deep sense of civic responsibility and taste.
There are other aspects of it that just feel inauthentic. I could be wrong on this, but the Irish seem totally out of place. Was being Irish something people actually gave a shit about in New Orleans, especially when it was a Catholic city? It feels like the Czechs making this game - Czechs adopting stereotypes, visions of the area, from Yankees who are already ignorant of it - were just copying shit from the Northeast, from the generic Godfather type crap they had already adapted, without thinking if it made sense. This also goes for the tone of revolution. I could be totally wrong on this, but my impression is that the Black Power shit, the radicalism, was a Northern and West Coast phenomenon. You did not see crap like that in the Civil Rights South, SDS and what not came in to stir shit up but the Blacks were largely a religious church crowd and didn't try to start shit with the Whites like Panthers, BLA and what not did elsewhere.
You've got a lot of stuff with these racist restaurants and stores and stuff, things that Blacks themselves would have probably liked back then (a diner called the Briar Patch; Br'er Rabbit tales are something Blacks told their children), things that are so absurdly touristy that you could only really imagine them being marketed to Yankees or being located in the North in real life.
One thing that disappointed me was that it always seems to characterize the country/bayou people as worse than the city people. I don't know enough about Cajuns to say what their view of Blacks was, but they owned few slaves, were largely neutral in the Civil War, were discriminated against in their own state. Like Appalachians but in an even worse position. This was also about the start of the era when Cajuns began to develop a racial consciousness. And they weren't fucking Klansmen. It would have gone a long ways if Burke's Irishmen had been replaced with a Cajun ally gang, either in the bayou or the city or both, but instead the "coonasses" seem to always be played off negatively. And it saddens me because I've made it a big part of my life (outside of my actual job) to study this history and culture, and it feels like a slap in the face to the rural French folk of Louisiana.
That's the same kind of vibe I'd get from RDR2's Lemoyne (and to a lesser extent Roanoke Ridge, but Roanoke Ridge isn't near as lopsided; the people of Butcher's Creek and the Murfrees are horror movie stereotypes, but Annesburg is a normal company town). You have a wonderful, colorful little world to explore, and then the characters spit so much venom about it, like having someone else along on a vacation that hates it and bitches about it the whole time.
Very disappointed. I think Hangar 13 will make a great Mafia 4 one day, and if a person doesn't give a shit about all I just said Mafia 3 can still be really fun, but for me personally it felt insulting and ignorant.