Mafia 1 DE and 2 both were largely linear and didn’t waste your time with fluff. I really enjoyed those two. Mafia 3 on the other hand had good story drip fed to you after hours of grind.

Ubisoft like mechanics:

• Each area has wiretaps that help a lot, but are very much like liberating radio towers, less grand.
• Once you open up a district, you’ve to do a checklist of repetitive missions, x2, and then go back to one of the areas from the already done missions to kill the underboss. Rinse and repeat 9 times. So that becomes more like (6 missions + 1) x 2 x 9. Some missions are optional. But it’s quite a lot. There’s some variety and some interesting story beats, but when it’s given in such grindy manner you have to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.
• A lot of the missions are set up like far cry outposts or assassinate a target style. In fact you are incentivised to play stealth, to the point you start feeling like an assassin or hitman.