The last RE I played was #2 and it was okay but seemed, I don't know, clunky. It just seemed kind of slow and tedious to move, draw, aim, fire, dodge etc etc etc. Am I to assume 3 and 4 are smoother? If they are then even without playing them I can say they should go high up on the list because the series certainty excels in everything else.

Of course those problems may just be the result of it being a bad port.

One of my favourites that I was actually thinking about before reading this thread is Transformers: War for Cybertron. I know Transformers games don't have the most prestigious history but War for Cybertron is hands down the best of the Transformers game franchise. I haven't played the sequel yet but I really want to as it seems just as good.

First off, being able to pick from multiple characters in each level in the Campaign is great because each character has their own roles/loadouts/abilities so there's good incentive for replaying, and the co-op was pretty fun too. Second, the gameplay itself was very enjoyable. Even though you play as bulky characters, the movement and aiming felt solid and being able to transform at any time and moving around in vehicle form is a blast! A lot of areas in levels are very open and so you get a lot of freedom with how you want to move around whether stomping through or driving/flying your way to the end, and the levels themselves were nice and varied, with great art and sound design.

There's also multiplayer and though I'm sure there's probably no one playing it anymore, it was still pretty enjoyable. And if memory serves there was also a co-op Horde mode that was pretty neat as well. The co-op was online only unfortunately. But the Campaign mode had one for Autobots and Decepticons, which was rad as hell. (The Decepticon portion was probably my favourite just because the levels were so much fun and had some really cool moments, like being chased by Omega Supreme throughout an entire level.) War for Cybertron is, in my opinion, a fantastic game and if you're in need of a giant, transforming-robot third-person shooter, than I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Other third-person shooters that I highly recommend; Dead Space, Tomb Raider (2013), the Mass Effect series.

Even though it got bashed for not being open world like its predecessor I really liked Red Faction Armageddon. Just a really solid, really fast bug hunt shooter with great weapons and destruction physics. Only reason people ever seem to look down on it is "it's just a great shooter."

I like my third-person shooters mixed with horror. I'm thinking of games like Resident Evil 4, Dead Space 1, and Spec Ops: The Line (which focuses on the real horrors of war, as opposed to sci-fi horrors).
You're absolutely right. Dead Space 1 was heavily inspired by Resident Evil 4. The Dead Space 1 team loved Resident Evil 4 so much when it was released that they changed the direction of the project that would go on to become Dead Space, in order to basically try to make it, "Resident Evil 4 in space, with better shooting mechanics, and with more horror." The developers talked about it in this interview: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-resident-evil-4-turned-system-shock-3-into-dead-space/

Not yet, but I'm definitely interested based on what I've seen of it.

The book certainly had jet packs. It looked really odd in the film when they did not have them.

I seriously need to get round to reading that book sometime.

Steam has all of them remastered. I think I'll start from the beginning to and move on from there.

I absolutely loved Soldner Secret Wars, which had FPS elements but was primarily intended to be played in 3rd person. It was a multiplayer shooter and played like a combination of ArmA and Battlefield with fully destructible environments, way before BF: Bad Company did it, and had huge maps to play on. Unfortunately it also suffered from bugs and performance issues which made SSW pretty much dead on arrival. Nevertheless I enjoyed it a lot.

Furthermore the Transformers games War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron really stood out to me. Their shooting mechanics were nothing fancy and special, but those two games absolutely nailed the Transformers G1 atmosphere and despite changing many aesthetics and having a slightly darker tone they were amazingly close to the source material.

Coincidentally I can't really imagine any of these games as FPS. I think the reason for that is that 3rd person views are more akin to playing with toys while 1st person views are more suited for “this is me” atmospheres. The former is more like watching your avatar moving through the world as part of it (maybe similar to watching an interactive movie?) while the latter is “you” being in the world. Some settings just lend themselves better to the charm of the third person view imo and those three afore mentioned games benefited from it. With that being said though I think it is mainly a matter of which atmosphere a game is intended to subconsciously convey that decides whether its point of view is first or third person.

Max Payne 3 doesn't get the love it really deserved, what a great 3rd person shooter

I'm seeing repeated mentions for Transformers and Max Payne. Never played Transformers, so I don't have an opinion on it, but I can see how the movement mechanics of turning from robot to car and back again would be a plus.

Max Payne I always thought looked very interesting, and have tried playing it multiple times, but it always ends up with me losing interest an hour in. All fights seemed to play out the same way for me: jump to the side and shoot, repeat until all enemies are dead. I think if there were more mechanics beyond the diving slow motion, or different enemies from regular armed mafiosos (at least these are all I found in my limited time playing the game) that forced me to use different strategies, maybe it work better for me.

Yeah. That's pretty much the whole game. I like them, not love them, like them, but I can't lie. Pretty much run in, shoot, dive, shoot.

100% agree. In my 5 favorite games of all time list. Without a doubt. I was amazed.