Parapolitical, climate doomer, cyberpunk thriller disguised as a Call of Duty game. Treyarch presents gamers with their toughest challenge yet: Be able to read.

I think that there is an important discussion to have about how much of your plot, setting and world-building are supposed to be shown/told, but I won't bother with it right now. I'll only say that winks and nods towards a deeper, richer world in the actual game that you are playing are probably not actually enough to engage most people and this is a legitimate criticism.
BUT, if you are interested in what the campaign is about, there is a whole in-game wiki which explains the setting and backstory of the plot, factions, history and characters, its actually insane. Down to the caliber of each weapon in the game, what metal alloys the robots are made out of, which countries form part of the Winslow Accord (super NATO, basically) and the CDP (super BRICS, kind of) and even WHEN they were incorporated.
And that still is not the whole picture. The collectibles you find unlock extra lore which amounts to little more than flavor text, but I personally love stuff like that. You can tell that a LOT of effort went into the setting of this game. One collectible in particular that you find in one of the Egypt levels unlocks a wiki link that takes you to a fictional blog of an Egyptian soldier before the NRC invasion, which is crazy since you can only access it through the link in the collectible entry inside the data vault. The only explanation you are given about the importance of the place you visit is given two lines in a cutscene and they are basically: We need to find a guy here and people are fighting over water. That's it. The wiki gives some very welcome context and personality to the game. Another collectible gives you information regarding the implanted chips the main characters get: How they, in essence, allow full VR-like experiences down to extrasensory phenomena like melding memories, what the hallucinations that you see in the game might be and why they look so real to the main character. Again, nothing explained in depth during the main story, besides some allusions to things.

Why did they choose to hide so much of the game? I don't know the real answer, but I speculate that it was two things: The way that the community engaged with the Zombies game mode easter eggs and the fact that if a lot of the background writing was translated into gameplay it would have been easily three times bigger than it is, I'm talking RPG levels of size and something like that was likely way too ambitious for a Call of Duty campaign. They most likely expected a similar level of engagement with the story from players, but fans certainly made it known that this is not what they were looking for, unfortunately.
The campaign itself is perfectly fine at worst, I genuinely do not understand the hate it got. Most COD campaigns (I would argue a lot of FPS games) are trite! At least here they designed more open levels and you can progress your character by unlocking stuff for your loadouts like in the multiplayer mode which makes it immediately more interesting than previous campaigns since there are now abilities and perks tailored to aggressive, passive or movement heavy playstyles. Cloaks, boosters, charge attacks, multi-target stuns, anti-robot abilities, possession mechanics(!), gear suited for robot or humans enemies. Tons of ways to play. Also, a scoring system and challenges are in there if you like replaying levels that way as well.
From the amount of hate the campaign got one would think that it was completely broken or unfinished or something, but it totally is the opposite of that. The other COD games only really stand out by having big set-pieces or very scripted, linear missions which are fine and what the majority of fans want, I suppose, but none of those stuck with me more than this game. Finding out that the game is basically about a second cold war with a bipolar world created by actual conflict and tensions around today was so fascinating to me, no other COD game even tries something like this one.

This game makes me a bit sad knowing how much talent and creativity they had at Treyarch at the time and how they are relegated to making Call of Duty games seemingly forever. They clearly wanted to do more, but we can only imagine what could have been if their situation was different.
Oh and by the way, this was easily the best "jetpack era" Call of Duty muliplayer mode.

Fantastic romp through PS1 era square ass cities. Enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to.
This game serves as a nice contrast to other driving games of this era that focused more on track racing such as Gran Turismo and Ridge Racer which was a bigger genre back then. The open-ended levels give a nice degree of freedom to your maneuvers around the streets.
Speaking of maneuvers, the driving in this game is so satisfying. It's arcade-y enough to keep it fun but with enough realism to push you to improve your skills and take better corners, apply brakes efficiently, dodge traffic, etc.

The most prominent pain points in this game relate to mission design: Some missions in the second half are dreadful. I'm talking boring AND hard. I don't know if they just gave up with their missions or what, but just making you drive all the way across the maps is not engaging at all, on top of the fact that longer missions are just simply more annoying since your "Felony" meter (or Wanted meter) keeps building up making cops more aggressive. The cop spawning system guarantees that you will bump into cops at some point, and you can't avoid it, unless you want to cut it really close with your timer. The infamous final mission is the best example of this. You need to get from one end of the map to the other on max felony pretty much the entire time. I don't think I would have completed it without save states. I don't even feel bad about it.

Still, I loved this game despite the bad spots. Apparently, a lot of people drop this game in the tutorial that's inside the car park. I thought it was really fun, but I guess it’s a nice barometer for your enjoyment of the game. It shows you what you can do in this game with your car, and you may or may not find it cool enough to stick it out. I know I did.

I have always read from discussions and reviews of this game how badly the "console-ization" of the gameplay detracted from it but had never experienced the game myself. Turns out, people were correct for criticizing this game at the time. I can't imagine what the super fans of the first game felt when they finally got their hands on this.
Crysis 2 is set a couple of years after the first game ends and continues with the big question "what's up with all these alien guys?". Turns out they are all over the world! I'm going to be honest, I wanted to comment on the story more, but I can barely remember anything as I was so bored by the end.

Now look, there is nothing wrong with linear games, I don't have a strong preference one way or another. If a game does linear or open well, I'll like it. But think a bit about what you actually do here: You are fighting two sets of enemies for the entire game, CELL soldiers (humans) and alien guys. These two sets have a couple of notable enemy types, but most of the mooks you gun down are just hitscan grunts that punish you for peeking out of cover while you lay rounds into them. There is just not a lot to this; some of the suit powers return from the first game (Armor, "Speed", and Cloak), but neither the arenas you fight in, nor the guys you shoot demand anything special from you. You CAN cloak and sneak up on one dude, take them out, then sneak over to another guy and so on, but then you're just taking way more time than is necessary to clear out areas. Cloaking, ambushes and hit and run tactics just don't feel worth it here, when in the first game you have a lot of foliage and terrain to break line of sight and re-engage. You could also go guns blazing using armor mode in the first game, but you were slow and exposed and enemies were generally smarter. In Crysis 2, armor mode has no real downside since you have to plow through enemies all the time anyway. Situations do not depend on much beside what weapons you have with you and even then, it's only a choice between short- and long range.

The gameplay just doesn't ask much of you. In my opinion, tons of first-person shooters from this generation and the next suffered from this thing where devs had to design encounters in linear games in a way that most people can get through them eventually, accounting for all kinds of skill and experience levels. The principle is completely fine, of course, I don't care for keeping people from finishing a game and letting only skilled people beat it, but I suspect that most people that played this casually will not be able to recall most encounters since you most likely just gunned everything down quick. There is a fine balance to encounter design where you want to streamline things so people can enjoy themselves, but surely you need to throw people some curve balls to make people try new approaches and engage with all of the elements of your combat system.

Still, I would not call the game "bad", it’s just very disappointing to me. The game does have very strong art direction! Maybe a little too gritty, but I liked the whole "disaster movie" thing they went with, even though I prefer the pretty landscapes and global illumination tech of the first game. Oh and the sound direction is really cool. I liked that a lot, actually. It's nice as hell.
I finished it in around 8 hours on hard mode and I can't say I recommend it. I tried to like it, man. I really tried.