It’s just every other one built in Unity or Unreal

I think this has a lot to do with it. A lot of these platforms have defaukts or even jusy tendencies baked into the development process. It takes an experienced developer to dive in the “feel”.

For making the first Spyro game, Insomniac hired a NASA engineer who had experiencing making flight control systems in order to dial in the feel of controlling Spyro. That’s the kind of thing that costs a lot of money, but made the game one of the most successful 3D platformers of all time.

Another thing to look at is assets. Models, textures, fonts, UI design, sound design. It’s easy to go cheap here: free asset libraries or cheap ones available for purchase. Some of these assets might be fine on their own, but when combined together they’re just…slightly… Off. Because they weren’t designed to be cohesive in a space together. Making one model that looks good takes talent and time. Making thousands of models that look good together takes planning, coordination, and direction.

And these are a lot of things that are easy for a small team to overlook, or at least de-prioritize. Smaller teams are usually driven by game designers who have specific designs in mind. They want to tweak numbers or implement systems. They design the game first, and then slap on whatever art assets they can to make it appealing enough to their audience.