I kind of agree. The first one was a really nice surprise, with a pretty interesting story. I didn't really like that the second game turned into a looter shooter, and had a worse story, but it was still fun to play. Now the third game is a bit strange. It is fun to play, but it clearly stole some Doom Eternal mechanics, like glory kills, which the game never actually needed, and is extremely short. It's probably the shortest release I've ever played, excluding DLCs and expansions.

I liked the 2nd one the best so far

Third has the best gunplay by far in my opinion.

Second one is the best by far. Third one is highly entertaining but was too linear.

You're 100% correct OP. First game is a bonafide classic. The second game unnecessarily chased the 'looter-shooter' fad and was utterly miserable. The third game halved the campaign length to a pathetic 5 hours. Shadow Warrior fell off hard.

i have no idea about the 1st game yet, but 2nd installment made me nauseous af for some reason and i just gave up after getting the girl back, the 3rd one was the only one i managed to finish (due to non nauseating gameplay/graphics), and it left me wanting more, which is what a good campaign game is supposed to do.

I believe it was the new flying mechanic and special boss arenas that caused the game to be so short because there was just so much work put into that area for so many possibilities during the fight, sadly most of it will be wasted since you can just adopt a conservative strategy to get around most things, not to mention the buttons for special effects on those structures are so tiny and need a auto lock to actually hit easily.

However the game was really easy to pick up due to the lack of weapon management and straightforward upgrades, which is what we need in a fun and almost brainless shooter with silly one liners. Not having to conserve ammo most of the time compared to SW2 was a huge plus imo, as the game is really way more fun when you don't need to consider so much stuff, or run out of ammo at a crucial time to kill the movie like quality of the gameplay.

Sadly the maps were way linear and did not have any exploration value. One of the few replay value this installment had was to come up with multiple ways to kill the same enemies in more entertaining manners. The main thing that propped this game up was Lo Wang's one liners.

So I'm not sure you can call this getting worse, imo this 3rd installment would be the best as it gave me the most fun. It's just a bit short. To each his own.