I don't play because it's too much like an older game, Planetside.
Not totally, but the mech, the aircraft, the infantry weaponry, it's fairly equal to what Planetside felt like. Planetside had a few things different though, instead of a max of 64 people per server, you could play with up to 400 at a time, on 3 teams, trying to capture entire bases (titan anyone?).
The weapons are way too inaccurate and there's a lot of bugs/problems with the game. I do think it's a bit more than a mod for BF2, having larger textures and a some new shaders. However, it's the same engine, the same physics, and with all the damn wall-glitching people, it feels like BF2 1.3. Every server has someone camping inside a wall with a turret. You can't ban people fast enough.
I DO feel like BF2142 is a beta release. Yep. The whole game. How can you release a game that's so not finished yet, and get away with it? I've never bought the game, but my friend did, and I will not be buying 2142. For the first few days, he couldn't even get into an online server, so we had to play offline. When he finally did get into a server, he had constant crashes and horrible gameplay - even on his powerhouse system, it lagged. He earned a good amount of points, but couldn't do something related to unlocks - I don't know, I was dissatisfied by that time. He feels cheated and I feel lucky that I didn't drop $50 on an unfinished product. On the scale they're selling games, you'd think they'd allow 6-8 weeks more for development and fine-tuning. Just think if Ford or Toyota released a car that wasn't finished yet. "Come back in 3 weeks and we'll install your muffler, and in another 3 weeks we'll install your stereo."
I haven't had the time to play BF2 in a while, but when I do get around to playing again, I'm sure that I'll have fun (someone said tons of pros are gone, so there's a lot of farming the noobs who don't have BF2142).