the mission design was attrocious. You did the same thing over and over again. Sometimes even in the same areas. It had a lot of potential but the final product was just bad from a gameplay perspective
I mean I agree, it was awful when you had to clean up a warehouse to fill up the money gauge to unlock the next main mission, only to see that the next main mission is cleaning the same warehouse again, but this time with the boss being there, it's terrible, that's why I think it could be better if they removed the parts where you need to do all these little side missions to unlock money, and just keep the main ones, it would be less repetitive.
I do think however that the gameplay itself (the character controls) was really good, I really liked the feeling, and it also had an actually pretty good ennemy AI, I was very surprised by this. For example if you were in a gun fight and hide behind something, and then move somewhere else while still hiding, the ennemies will keep shooting at your last visible location for a little while, and would then come check the area. This was a lot more immersive than games where ennemies are constantly aware of your position as soon as the alert is on.
I hate it in games when if an ennemy sees you, the whole map immediatly know where you are and will never lose you. I had a lot of situations that were very believable and immersive thanks to how Mafia 3 works.