Ditching any semblance of parody that was present in the last two games, Max Payne 3 tells a straight-faced and not-very-good story in a setting completely unrelated to the first two games with a polar opposite look and style. "Crime" and "Brazil" go together pretty well, but bright sunny environments do not mesh well with Max Payne. This isn't a tongue-in-cheek, dark and rainy Neo-Noir game, this is "Max Payne Takes a Vacation (and shoots people while monologuing)."
The iconic art style that helped to make Max Payne so unique is completely gone. Most notably, the graphic novel story segments have been replaced by long and sometimes tortuous cutscenes, with pointless flashy screen effects and words appearing on screen when characters say "important" things. They're unskippable for the most part, often telling you the level is still loading when you try to skip them even after several minutes, which is a dirty lie. The first time you load the game, it opens straight into a ridiculously long unskippable cutscene before you're even allowed to do so much as change the fucking graphics options; which I can only assume is meant to prepare you for how long-winded and obnoxious this game can be.
Gameplay wise, it does a couple of interesting things with animations, but all at the expense of player freedom:
Q: Shall we let players carry as many weapons as they want, like in the first two games?
A: Well that would be fun, but I have this idea of how we can create unique animations so that Max carries three weapons at once realistically. So let's do that instead. But no more than three! That's too arcadey.
Q: How can we make the cutscenes more dynamic?
A: Well, let's make it so that Max always takes his sidearm out during a cutscene, whichever one is currently in the players inventory! For added realism, we should make sure it's always equipped when the cutscene finishes, even if the player was using their assault rifle before, and even if we throw them directly into a room full of enemies. So they need to spend a few seconds changing back to the weapon they actually wanted to use while they're busy getting shot at from all angles! Sometimes, if players insist on using Uzis instead of pistols, we'll remove those from their inventory and switch them with pistols, just for the cutscene, because fuck 'em.
Q: Shall we make the player movement feel smooth and intuitive at the expense of realism?
A: Hah, no! Let's make sure Max's animations are extremely realistic so that he can smack his head on walls when he dives around, fall over randomly, and won't respond immediately to the controls because our super realistic animations need to catch up first! We need to go for that "human tank" effect.
Q:......
A: Oh yeah and lets not include any grenades or molotovs, no one liked those in the other games. By the way, whats your opinion on cover systems?
I feel that Rockstar, having taken the development reigns from Remedy, didn't understand what made Max Payne so good. So we're left with this... It's not terrible, it can be fun, and it's superficially Max Payne, but under the surface it's a fairly generic shooter. A shell of itself. This is a game that forgot its roots and started taking itself way too seriously.