I saw Noah's latest insanely thorough analysis which happened to be about the Mafia series and wanted to add to his conclusions a bit (you should watch it though, it's excellent). I've been working my way through another playthrough of Mafia III to see what I missed and how I feel about it after saying my piece.
First, the technical side of things. A couple of patches dropped by the time I picked it back up and while this game is certainly never going to run as well as something like Mad Max, it does run appreciably better than it did when I was first going through it. Frame rates are generally in the high 40 - 60ish range with basically the same amount of random stutter caused by... I'm really not sure what. It's especially strange given that the earlier builds of the Illusion engine that the first 2 Mafia games ran on were so smooth, but to be charitable to the game it is definitely a real leap in terms of visual fidelity, and Mafia III's art direction is something I've only grown warmer on since my first run through. The facial animations (and most of the character models) are the best I've ever seen in an open-world game of this breadth and at certain times of day the environment looks absolutely gorgeous, particularly nighttime and the sunsets/rises. It rains too much and the sunlight reflecting off the wet asphalt completely blinds you and there is something very wrong with the chrome reflections on the cars, but I'm still impressed by the scope of the game and it's relative amount of detail.
The whole racism thing is handled mostly fine, if not really, really safely. Like I said in my review, Lincoln is so far outside the realm of the average person's existence (especially in 1968) that it there weren't as many opportunities for racism to be expressed through the mechanics as I had hoped. The differing response times of the police depending on the wealth of the neighborhood is a great touch that cleverly pulls double duty as narrative reinforcement and an easily tweakable difficulty setting, but I still wish they had carried over and expanded on the police interaction system from Mafia II. Constantly living in fear of giving a cop the tiniest excuse he needs to pull you over and ruin your plans for the next objective sounds like incredible to me, and while I understand that the developers wanted to create something appealing to a wide range of gaming tastes, I'm kind of hoping some enterprising modder is able to bring that system back in some form. The racism stuff in the narrative itself is honest and well written but it doesn't really go beyond "Man, racists suck. Doesn't murdering them feel good?" I mean yeah, but what after killing the same identical goon for the 500th time, it loses emotional heft. What if one of Marcano's capos was another black man (or woman)? Maybe it turns out one of the Haitans from the gang that Lincoln slaughtered had survived and was working with Sal so he wouldn't have the rest of them killed just like he did with Lincoln and Sammy? That would've been insane.
On the other hand, it's easy to forget how fragile Lincoln really is - you absolutely do not want the cops anywhere near you because you will get annihilated very quickly. Unfortunately, the game is so generous with placing the objectives in areas without any witnesses that it's very rare to be engaging in a battle in public. On top of that the only enemies who are able (allowed? Who knows) to call for backup are specific, lightly armed dudes who get smeared with giant icon over their heads to let you know when to worry about them. The AI in general is distressingly poor and is probably the single biggest letdown of Mafia III. If you're going to make your game's primary mechanic cover-based gunfights, having sub par AI really weights the experience down.
Finally, I was glad to see Noah mention the final sequence of the game in a good light, as the confrontation with Georgi, Sal, and dealing with your lieutenants felt so damn cathartic that it almost made up for the 15 hours of interchangeable repetition before it. It seems like people agree that Mafia III's story is it's strong suit but I want to mention again the writing as it really struck me my first time with the game and is still keeping me glued to the screen during cutscenes. There's this fatalistic self-aware quality that sets it apart from so many other games because the characters here are all pretty sure they're going to end up dying by the end of it all. Lincoln and his lieutenants don't try to pretend like they're "good guys" and everyone has this kind of resigned nihilism that is right out of Cormac McCarthy. It can be a boring as hell, but the nuggets of humanity tucked inside Mafia III ultimately make it worth experiencing, I think.
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