This game would’ve been forgotten if not for its title. It's not a technically bad game, but it's not a good game either. It's just another generic uninspired 7th-gen third-person shooter sapping more money off the Max Payne IP.

The game wasn't designed with Max Payne's bullet-time or dodging mechanics in mind, other than their frequent use in scripted sequences. The actual gameplay is much like if Metal Gear Solid patched in dodging with bullet-time—okay, it's a feature, but these scenarios sure weren't designed with this ability in mind. The loss of OG Max Payne's arcadey controls, in favor of stiff but "realistic" movement, was also a disappointment.

The set-pieces in Payne & Lynch 3 aren't like those in Mass Effect or Uncharted, here they're drab and repetitive. There's nothing impressive, it all feels the same. Boom, explosion, Rico Rodriguez jumps to safety, but oh no—look! Six enemies are beneath you! Bullet-time has been automatically activated, leaving you plenty of time to get them all in the head. And so this occurs once every twenty or so minutes, in a bland, repetitive grind. When the enemies die, Kane monologues as you trail the linear path, with the environments lacking the interactivity of the previous games, and despite Rockstar's fame with open world titles, opportunities for small-scale exploration being minimal.

This game offers nothing of interest. Its story is both predictable and overly-clichéd, its characters are completely forgettable, and even Max himself is reduced to nothing more than your generic empty action protagonist. The game is polished, its shooting functions as it should, but for all the money poured into this project, they somehow couldn't add some level of substance to this garden variety shooter.