First, I want to say that, though I do agree with some points in the article, I very much disagree with others.
The author falls into the trap of listing things he likes as things that have to be in a game for it to be good. Guns have to be over-powered? Bullshit. One of the things I love about the Fallout series is that even after you get over-powered guns, you still have limited ammunition for a long time, so you're still using your pea-shooters on the trash mobs. FPS games don't have to be open world to be good, either.
The problem isn't that the sequels weren't open-world or didn't have the ability to lean, it's that they changed so much, and that change was seldom for the better.
Just for the record, I thought Crysis 2 was pretty good, for the most part. Crysis 3, however, wasn't very good at all. By the end of the game, I was just pushing myself to keep playing so I could get it over with.
Really, forget about Crysis. Crysis 3 wasn't bad because it wasn't like Crysis, it was bad because it was bad.
I've grown to hate the whole "once you walk past a certain point, a bunch of enemies jump out" design, which is what Crysis 3 lived on. The stealthing was sub-par, which was especially glaring to me because I'd just beaten Deus Ex: HR--a game which is mostly linear but still very, very good. It was also annoying how you'd walk great distances without anything happening, as though you were just supposed to marvel at the graphics for awhile.
