This is interesting but I’m not sure how to describe it. It was a strange time in gaming, during the mid 2000s, there was a hump where game franchises weren’t as good. A lot of franchises that lost a bit of quality between the sixth and seventh gens. They weren’t bad games but they begun the decline of the series. The games chased trends, focused off graphics, tried random mechanics or a combination of them.

The first one that comes to mind is NFS: Carbon. This was the sequel to Most Wanted and people describe it as Most Wanted 2. The issue was many things were copied and pasted, it just wasn’t as good. They tried this new team racing mechanic and your teammates had their own abilities and it wasn’t as good. After came the over saturation of the franchise with games getting worse.

Splinter Cell Double Agent came after a great trilogy. It took the brown color palette and took away the HUD. The story wasn’t good, it wanted to appeal to everyone. It wanted to be an undercover cop game but in Splinter Cell. Like games now where they try to humanize the character and the plot wasn’t good. The gave you loyalty choices and they were just meh. Multiplayer wasn’t as good either. The 6th gen version was better but still not as good.

Burnout: Revenge was not a bad game. Some say it’s the best one, but Takedown was the best one. It perfected the formula and Revenge tried new ideas, but was not as good. New race types were just variants of existing ones. The old event types were made more intense.

Rainbow Six Vegas was unique for the time. It was a better game than Rainbow Six: Lockdown. The series reverted to being tactical but still wasn’t as good as Rainbow Six 3. Vegas kept the customized characters or P.E.C from Lockdown and added weapon customizing. The issue was it became a cover shooter and used a third person camera. The game felt like there was input lag to make it feel heavy. The maps weren’t bad just not as good as 3. I felt the idea of terrorists taking over Vegas was just random. Almost an excuse to use Vegas as the setting.

Amped 3 was a letdown. Amped 2 was a snowboard sim and I can’t think of another. Amped 3 tried to be arcadey and like 1080 Snowboarding.

PGR3 was an exception to this. The game didn’t have as many tracks and cars as the earlier ones. But they gave you a good amount of new content to make up for it. The graphics were crazy and still look good. There was no showroom, but you got a bunch of garages for your cars. There was a lot of them, and you can walk around them and play Geometry Wars. There was a track creator where you choose the city and connect roads. There was only four cities but there was so many unique routes and they had some long ones.