Defender of the Crown gives me so much flashbacks. The artwork is still great!
I played it quite a bit.
Modern games are very different to that. I don't have any close attachment to those "who got the better 3D engine". They seem to lack cleverness; it's all a unified, singular game experience following a very simple recipe that has been dumbed down. Clones.
Sometimes there are exceptions to that formula; I liked little nightmares, even though it was also very dumbed down, but it was a bit different still to the usual 3D engine colour-flash-splashy effects.