There's a major caveat you have to accept up-front going into Max Payne 3 - this is a cinematic linear cover shooter made by Rockstar with all that entails in game design, writing, storytelling, and visual direction. If you can come to terms with that and take it as it is you'll have a great time with a game that's one of the more interesting of its time and style, but it's also a massively bitter pill to swallow for fans of Remedy's works especially if you're coming right off of Max Payne 1 and 2, some of the best and most unique third person shooters ever made.
Both Max Payne 3's biggest strengths and weaknesses come from utilizing GTA4-style realistic damage physics.
Starting with the good: the way this interacts with enemies is amazing, letting you pull off tricky shots like shooting an enemy behind cover in the knee, bringing them buckling down and opening them up to a clean shot. When killing the last enemy in the group you get a slow-mo killcam where you can keep firing and it never gets old watching the fucker get blown away.
While you can totally play MP3 like a traditional cover shooter, Max still has access to his shootdodge and bullet time and these interact with the cover system surprisingly smoothly. Bullet time is useful making a quick sweep of a group of enemies behind cover and for maneuvering around the mini-boss enemies who bring in a heavy machine gun. Shootdodging allows you to dive between and over cover to get the drop on enemies and now drops you to a prone position you can keep as long as you like, which is useful for keeping a low profile and finishing off enemies but leaves you vulnerable for a second while getting up. Shootdodging can be done even without any adrenaline in your meter so making the most of it is key to surviving harder encounters. The physics engine also gives Max a really satisfying weight to movement - while Max Payne 1 and 2 felt buttery smooth in PC shooter tradition you can really feel the full weight of every dive and crash in 3. This all adds up beautifully in a section near the end of the game where you take on a shitload of military police in an airport terminal while HEALTH's TEARS pounds away in the background, with the level design being perfectly suited to its style of dodging from cover to cover and for a few amazing minutes MP3 reaches its full potential. If a game could be judged solely by how cool it looks in thirty second twitter clips, Max Payne 3 would be one of the best games ever made
Now the flaws in using this style of physics system: the way it interacts with Max himself can sometimes feel frustrating. Using realistic body position-based damage can lead to the amount of damage you take feeling very inconsistent, which is especially compounded by MP3 being a much more long range game than 1 and 2's tight corridors. Far too often I died to a headshot that I had no idea where it came from. On top of that MP3 opts to not use regenerating health and instead uses the painkiller system from 1 and 2 which is a bit of a mixed bag. On paper it's a great idea, leading to situations where you need to carefully plan ahead while being quick to react when things inevitably go wrong and you have to yolo it by the skin of your teeth. A lot of times tho a stray shot can leave you with almost no health left and while that can lead to the prior exciting situation, it more often than not leads to your death and a reset (which thankfully on PC are at least very fast). There's also some good old Rockstar physics jank, in some situations your weapon model can rub up against some piece of geometry while shootdodging or prone and not actually fire where you're aiming for a crucial couple of seconds. All this ended up making me drop the game down from Hard to Medium halfway through because it started to grate on me, which is unfortunate because when it does all work it feels amazing.
The writing and storytelling are VERY Rockstar and early 2010s AAA game writing. Max is thankfully still played by and now modeled after the late great James McCaffrey which at least helps it still feels a bit like Max Payne, even as his own characterization feels a bit off - the game wants to play at the idea of the white guy coming into a developing country and fucking things up, but Max never felt like the "stupid gringo" this game makes him out to be before and it also just kind of plays that whole trope entirely straight by the end when Max teams up with the Good Cop to go outside the law and take down the Corrupt Cops. The rest of the cast are all very much what you'd expect from this era of Rockstar writing, very loud and in your face and a bit obnoxious. To its credit tho, they are at least reasonably well fleshed out with understandable motivations that line up with their actions that the game doesn't always spoon-feed to you. It isn't a high bar to clear but it's something. You also get to kill a shitload of fascist police which goes some way to balance out the maybe kind of racist bits where you're running through the favelas gunning down random Brazilian thugs.
MP3 also has some weird technical issues on PC, which IS where you're going to want to play thanks to the unmatched precision of a mouse. There's a weird negative acceleration that makes mouse movement feel sluggish above 60fps and sometimes aiming would just feel jittery for seemingly no reason which would have to be solved by restarting the game. The pre-rendered Bink cutscenes (which definitely show their age in encoding quality) were also quieter than the in-engine scenes and gameplay leading to a very inconsistent sound mix. The last cutscene also had glitchy playback even after applying a fix from pcgamingwiki because apparently Rockstar broke it in a patch in a very classic Rockstar move.
All in all - Max Payne 3 is one of the more interesting games to come out of the 7th gen cover shooter boom and definitely worth playing if you can stomach it being an entirely different thing from the first two games, tho even on its own merits it still has a few too many small issues that add up to keep it from true greatness.
Both Max Payne 3's biggest strengths and weaknesses come from utilizing GTA4-style realistic damage physics.
Starting with the good: the way this interacts with enemies is amazing, letting you pull off tricky shots like shooting an enemy behind cover in the knee, bringing them buckling down and opening them up to a clean shot. When killing the last enemy in the group you get a slow-mo killcam where you can keep firing and it never gets old watching the fucker get blown away.
While you can totally play MP3 like a traditional cover shooter, Max still has access to his shootdodge and bullet time and these interact with the cover system surprisingly smoothly. Bullet time is useful making a quick sweep of a group of enemies behind cover and for maneuvering around the mini-boss enemies who bring in a heavy machine gun. Shootdodging allows you to dive between and over cover to get the drop on enemies and now drops you to a prone position you can keep as long as you like, which is useful for keeping a low profile and finishing off enemies but leaves you vulnerable for a second while getting up. Shootdodging can be done even without any adrenaline in your meter so making the most of it is key to surviving harder encounters. The physics engine also gives Max a really satisfying weight to movement - while Max Payne 1 and 2 felt buttery smooth in PC shooter tradition you can really feel the full weight of every dive and crash in 3. This all adds up beautifully in a section near the end of the game where you take on a shitload of military police in an airport terminal while HEALTH's TEARS pounds away in the background, with the level design being perfectly suited to its style of dodging from cover to cover and for a few amazing minutes MP3 reaches its full potential. If a game could be judged solely by how cool it looks in thirty second twitter clips, Max Payne 3 would be one of the best games ever made
Now the flaws in using this style of physics system: the way it interacts with Max himself can sometimes feel frustrating. Using realistic body position-based damage can lead to the amount of damage you take feeling very inconsistent, which is especially compounded by MP3 being a much more long range game than 1 and 2's tight corridors. Far too often I died to a headshot that I had no idea where it came from. On top of that MP3 opts to not use regenerating health and instead uses the painkiller system from 1 and 2 which is a bit of a mixed bag. On paper it's a great idea, leading to situations where you need to carefully plan ahead while being quick to react when things inevitably go wrong and you have to yolo it by the skin of your teeth. A lot of times tho a stray shot can leave you with almost no health left and while that can lead to the prior exciting situation, it more often than not leads to your death and a reset (which thankfully on PC are at least very fast). There's also some good old Rockstar physics jank, in some situations your weapon model can rub up against some piece of geometry while shootdodging or prone and not actually fire where you're aiming for a crucial couple of seconds. All this ended up making me drop the game down from Hard to Medium halfway through because it started to grate on me, which is unfortunate because when it does all work it feels amazing.
The writing and storytelling are VERY Rockstar and early 2010s AAA game writing. Max is thankfully still played by and now modeled after the late great James McCaffrey which at least helps it still feels a bit like Max Payne, even as his own characterization feels a bit off - the game wants to play at the idea of the white guy coming into a developing country and fucking things up, but Max never felt like the "stupid gringo" this game makes him out to be before and it also just kind of plays that whole trope entirely straight by the end when Max teams up with the Good Cop to go outside the law and take down the Corrupt Cops. The rest of the cast are all very much what you'd expect from this era of Rockstar writing, very loud and in your face and a bit obnoxious. To its credit tho, they are at least reasonably well fleshed out with understandable motivations that line up with their actions that the game doesn't always spoon-feed to you. It isn't a high bar to clear but it's something. You also get to kill a shitload of fascist police which goes some way to balance out the maybe kind of racist bits where you're running through the favelas gunning down random Brazilian thugs.
MP3 also has some weird technical issues on PC, which IS where you're going to want to play thanks to the unmatched precision of a mouse. There's a weird negative acceleration that makes mouse movement feel sluggish above 60fps and sometimes aiming would just feel jittery for seemingly no reason which would have to be solved by restarting the game. The pre-rendered Bink cutscenes (which definitely show their age in encoding quality) were also quieter than the in-engine scenes and gameplay leading to a very inconsistent sound mix. The last cutscene also had glitchy playback even after applying a fix from pcgamingwiki because apparently Rockstar broke it in a patch in a very classic Rockstar move.
All in all - Max Payne 3 is one of the more interesting games to come out of the 7th gen cover shooter boom and definitely worth playing if you can stomach it being an entirely different thing from the first two games, tho even on its own merits it still has a few too many small issues that add up to keep it from true greatness.