Max Payne 3

But here is a fun little reminder of how much actual care went in MP3's gameplay:
No fucking transition from prone to crouch. Because the studio was so busy burning away hundred million dollars on cinematic animations and terrible rip off of man on fire, in this game, where every bullet dive ends up prone, and that has PURELY CHEST-HIGH-WALL CENTERED LEVEL DESIGN, Max can't go from prone to crouch without standing entirely upright.
It's just a cherry on top of what was an amazing pile of shit design and just straight up broken systems. I could spend two posts just listing every single way the near-death cam system was broken, for an example, but I think the issue above is completely sufficient.
This game has not been tested. Nobody gave a SINGLE FUCK how it plays. And you braindead retards, fucking ate that shit - hook, line, and sinker, because it looked "REALLY cinematic".
And that, on this board, is absolutely fucking amazing.

It looks cool because it cuts away before the part where the game comes to a screeching halt as you lose control of Max for nearly a second while he tries to stand up, completely exposed and like a complete retard.
The game is made to look cool in carefully edited videos. That is the whole point of it. As I said, it's incredibly poorly implement. It's also completely arbitrary, it's impossible to say what does and what does not count as cover, and Max is such a retard he does not understand the concept of keeping is head low unless the game completely specifically says "This is cover".

But then again - the game does not communicate the difference between killing and stunning enemies, as mentioned Max has to transitory states between prone and crouch, the controls are absolute garbage all around because "cool" blended animation take precedence over actual gameplay, and oh my god, that last stand mechanic... I don't think I've ever seen anything as fucking amazingly attrocious, so INSANELY DEVOID OF ANY CARE OR CONSIDERATION in AAA game in my LIFE.

So yeah, the game punishes you for basically any interaction, because it's an insanely shoddily made one. But cover is in no way special, and it was not a design decision for it to be this bad. It was just that nobody cared, at all. The dive mechanic is not fluid in Max Payne 3, at all. It prioritizes pointless physics shit instead of fluid, reliable mechanic. In Max Payne 1 and 2 you dive, you shoot, you recover. In Max Payne 3 you dive, you collide with Epstein's ghost midair, you crumble to the ground and you can't get up until you've take your lead medication.
You want a fluid third person shooter, play Resident Evil 6. Even more movement freedom, melee and shoot bang blended perfectly and no slowmotion crutch.

>ruined the game for him
It did not ruin the game. But it's a good illustration of the absurd lack of any care that was put into the gameplay itself. As I said, it's a cherry on the top of the shit-festival. Every aspect of the game is clunky, poorly thought through, or straight up completely broken. The fact that they did not consider such basic things like the fact that 80% of time, you want to time your bullet dives to end up behind a cover, because you are by design vulnerable for a few seconds - and the level design gives you only chest-high cover for 90% of the game, is amazingly illustrative, and bad enough to drop down a good game to a "meh" one, but my god there is so much more wrong on top of that shit. I've already mentioned: Blended animations being shared for death and knock-back animations, making it impossible to tell if an enemy is dead for good, or if he is going to jump back right on his feet in two seconds. The last stand LITERALLY DOES NOT WORK AS INTENDED EVER. They did not fucking consider that Max may die when there is an obstacle behind him - the camera can't deal with it, literally completely spazzes out unless you got shot somewhere far from any obstacles. And when it does not literally break, you still can't reload, so if you were shot while you were low on ammo: fuck you. You can't turn, so if you were shot by someone more than 15 degrees out of the centre of your screen: fuck you. It's an amazing trackwreck.

Weapons switching on the incredibly frequent cutscenes, tiny, hideous, absolutely poorly though through levels, brain-dead A.I., stogy-as-fuck controls, the cover based system being literally broken, no indication of constant point of no return, incredibly poor damage scaling, shit writing: The game is an absolute mess, there is no aspect of it that would be good from a gameplay perspective, or story-perspective for that matter.
It's literally PURELY designed to look good in curated videos.

Honestly, the idea that you can fuck up a dive is one of the few things about the game I can respect at least in theory. It could be a solid extension of the gameplay: forcing you to be much more deliberate and careful with your dives, instead of spamming them wildly as you ofen ended up doing in MP1/2. It I think was supposed to work in tenadem with the cover system, which makes sense and is one of the few cases where I think cover would be fitting as a complimentary system. The level desing also feels quite a lot geared toward that idea, where chest-high obstacles are thrown around so that you can bullet dive from one save spot to another, use the cover to recover, but stay on the move because most of it is destructable, forcing you to never hang back, always keep changing positions.

I think it was once a decent idea that some actually competent designer wrote down. It's just that it is executed so, SO fucking poorly, that honestly I don't know of many AAA games being just this bad.

It's a clear sign of developers not prioritizing gameplay or having a poor understanding of it. That all sounds good on paper but in reality all it will do is limit players freedom of action and make them not want to use the dive. That was my exact experience with Max Payne 3 during gameplay, i would be put in a situation where i would think "i should this, it would look cool" and then immediately that thought would be replaced with "better not, it's just gonna get me killed". That is an awful thing to happen in your stylish third person shooter.
>unskippable cutscenes
>bland levels and movement
>controls so stiff and unresponsive that they feel more like suggestions (i.e. Max needs to get into a stupid jumping mode to dive)
>can only carry 3 weapons at a time
>annoying escort missions
>convoluted, non-sensical misery porn story
>completely removes the interesting noir aesthetic of the original games in favor of GTA-lite
How anyone thinks MP3 is the best Max Payne is beyond me