You know how Mafia 1 and 2 were loved for how they tried to always discard most of the elements that ruined the pacing of the story, all the padding, unnecessary boring in-between things? How in Mafia 2 most hated elements were the arcadey pointless think on the story missions mostly delegated to the DLCs? How in Mafia 1 the whole "pure open world" stuff was a separate mode, done intentionally so not to ruin the pace of the main story? Now invert this design approach and you get Mafia 3 - all padding and busywork, almost no story. Game can tell a good story, the opening mission is a fantastic example of that. If they'd keep to that, instead of doing the exact same mission of "go to place, do same boring stealth action stuff, do it 500 more times", we might've gotten a very interesting game. Though, that said, it wouldn't have been a particularly good Mafia game either, since all of it's story feels like some weird amalgamation of "60s stuff", just various themes, topics, issues, mixed into one story, dressed on the main character who barely has any personality or reasoning of his own apart from "revenge". The music's good, the visuals are good, the gameplay is solid. If you just want to do pointless boring stuff in faux New Orleans, sure, you might actually get some enjoyment out of this. But if you're interested in Mafia series, you won't find this interesting (Vito's role here is pretty disposable). And if you want a good story driven game, there's way too little story here to spend dozens of hours on the game.
Maize is... sigh... If there ever was a game to encapsulate the bad whimsical kind of horror themed comedies of the 80s, this game is exactly that. Nonsensical plot about mad scientists, soviet intelligent teddy bear spitting gibberish "Russian" as a companion and words like "stupid", "imbecile", "idiot" and variations being about 70% of words in the script. Now, the whole concept could actually work, and that is exactly what is the saddest thing about the game is that it fails so miserably, mostly due to the fact that it recreates that vibe down to the "bad" part. Because it's bad. Not so bad it's good bad, but just bad as a comedy game. And as an adventure game it seems to want to be it's even worse, since you just run back and forth and put items on other items and paths open and close in a very linear fashion so you never "solve" anything as much as you just "do stuff". What's also surprising is how ugly the game often looks, despite the use of UE4, some stunning models and good animations. You can be in a very pretty looking location to just turn the corner and find yourself in a terrible "my first UE SDK map" room that looks sickeningly bad. It's a game that could've been, but went very-very wrong and really isn't worth the time.
