I played the hell out of that game back in the day. Mostly because I was on the QA team at EA. I spent 10 hours a day, 5 (sometimes 6) days a week for an entire year playing it and testing everything before release. You can see my name in the credits if you wait long enough.
I may be biased for that reason, but it is definitely my favorite of the series. In fact, I still have it on my main computer and play it from time to time.
Something that almost no one knows about it is that in the beginning beta builds when our team first started testing it you could play it at fairly high settings on a halfway decent video card. However, they were heavily promoting Nvidia and what the cry engine could do at the time. They basically wanted you to buy an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX. After a few builds the game became nearly unplayable on any low spec system if it wasn't on the lowest possible settings. The goal was to really make it shine on the 8800gtx.
I should do a post sometime about the whole experience. A lot of crazy stuff happened at that job.