"*ssip, they don't make shooters like they used to*"
But seriously, they really dont. Its like all the creativity of the 90's was taken out of single player FPS games once better graphics came along, and multiplayer games like Counterstrike and COD became staples in the genre.
It seems like every FPS game these days is the same rethread of cliches and can honestly be broken down into two main kinds of games. The military shooter and the Sci-Fi shooter. Rarely something that breaks the mold can pop up, but even those lack the character and creativity of what we had in the 90's.
Let's take for example, the Build engine games...
You had Duke Nukem, Blood and Shadow Warrior as the main three. All three of the games had vastly different environments and personality. Duke was a bombastic shooter with a modern day setting, Blood was a dark, horror themed game with a 19th century flair, and Shadow Warrior was a comical, cheesy action flick with a martial arts/asian flavor. All three games just FELT like three completely different experiences, yet they ran on the same engine.
At the same time, you had the IDtech games, Doom, Quake, Heretic and Hexen...all different experiences with character and style. It seems like these days everything has morphed into the same thing...
Not to mention, solving puzzles, looking for secrets and finding keycards, instead we have scripted battles and 400000 cutscenes.