Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.

Imo, they get the hype for being "deep" because they are pretty deep as far as popular games go. They are certainly deeper than COD's "Look, terrorists, shoot them!" or Mario's "Dragon stole my princess".