10 Video Game Sequels That Played Things Way Too Safe

A sequel is supposed to be bigger and holder than the previous entry. Taking what was great in that title and expanding on it, while staying true to the core experience enough to satisfy fans.

Then there are those next chapters in a franchise that completely drop the ball by being too afraid of moving out of the comfort zone offered by that previous titles success.

Sales mean a lot in business so developers often want to broaden the appeal of a game in the market to maximise profit at the expense of innovation. They also might fear losing the wallets of those first gamers who bought into a series before due to that initial entries offerings.

Other titles merely don't have the confidence of trying something new and evolving, less they feel the wrath of fans who hate those changes.

These are ten games plagued with that mindset so much that they became footnotes in their own franchises - playing things way too safe so much that their release may as well not happened at all other than to fill a quota.

They aren't all bad games, but the disappointment of how forgettable they became due to the minimal risks they took still stings.

It is crazy to think that a franchise spread across so many years has all of its games so indistinguishable from each other despite being released years apart.

There are just zero opportunities to innovate taken as visuals look startlingly similar across all three games, and the gameplay is pretty much copy and pasted wholesale to the sequels from Crackdown, right down to the criticisms the gunplay got in the first instalment.

Crackdown 2 was released three years after the first, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was released at the same time as it is by and large the exact same game. The entire development cycle appears to have been devoted to creating the lone zombie enemy type that was introduced.

The third game was even touted as having massive citywide destruction that would have injected the franchise with some much-needed freshness and given players something unique to look forward too. When the game was released, however, the feature was completely absent and it was back to the same drive, jump, shoot gameplay loop set in stone twelve years prior.

Both Crackdown sequels are quite literally the first game on repeat. They're the bare minimum of what you require for a sequel.