10 Video Game Franchises That Never Topped The Original

10. Serious Sam

Around the millennium, shooters like Halo, Deus Ex, and Half-Life began focusing more on story, strategy, and completing objectives rather than charging around boomsticks blazing.

Despite the major shift in the genre, Croteam stuck with their guns (literally,) releasing an old-school blaster in 2001 called Serious Sam: The First Encounter. With its over-the-top action and snarky humour, Serious Sam felt like a love letter to classic gun-toters like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. It offered an awesome challenge, action-oriented gameplay, and testosterone-filled battles. It didn't reinvent the wheel, but Serious Sam offered oodles of fun. 

Sadly, the bombastic fragfest is a franchise that just got worse and worse. The Second Encounter is simply more of the same. Serious Sam 2 (which is the third entry) was too cartoony, lacking the edgy bite of its predecessors. Serious Sam 3: BFE's closed environments and lack of puzzles presented a terribly tedious experience.

At this point, Croteam should've known how to avoid the pitfalls of the lesser sequels to ensure the next instalment was a return to form. Alas, Serious Sam 4 is so lacking in creativity, it's baffling why the developers bothered with it in the first place.