Just finished the Crysis trilogy (which I never played when it was new).

Continuity is really not the series’ strong point. The Ceph completely change in appearance and capability between the first and second game and there’s one tablet you might find somewhere near the end of the third that hand waves at explaining why. Laurence Barnes dies at the start of the second game and hands over the nanosuit to someone else, who acquires Barnes’ memories at the end. But then the third game ends with him announcing ‘I am Laurence Barnes’ as if he’s reclaiming his humanity. So, uh, what about the person you actually are? He’s just dead? Subsumed by the Barnes personality?

But the games were fun. The fascinating thing to me was how small tweaks in the mechanics completely changed how I played them. I played the first game like Halo, the second like Sniper Elite, and the third like Assassin’s Creed. Even though the gameplay was 90% the same, the small changes nudged me to play them very differently. Probably an interesting MPhil thesis in there somewhere.