From a developer’s point of view, follow-ups can be a particularly precarious balancing act. There’s a pre-existing fanbase to consider, but you also want to attract new players. As such, you need to try to provide something that feels fresh, but doesn’t paint over what people liked about the first game. Change too much and you risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Too little and players might as well just replay the original again. ‘More of the same’ is a misleading term: the elements that drew punters in the first time are unlikely to have a similar impact the second time around.
From our point of view, analysing a known quantity is in some respects easier; scoring them, though, is a thorny business. If we only rewarded novelty and innovation then few sequels, however refined, could ever hope to match or best their forerunners, even when providing a demonstrably better play experience. All the same, you can’t deny the thrill of the new, while you want to make sure readers spend a chunk of the one life they’ll ever have on a game that offers something meaningfully distinct (even if some really do just want the same thing but slightly bigger and shinier).