I finally broke down and purchased Soldier of Fortune: Payback on GOG since it was discounted and I was expecting the worse! It's linear and the AI is bad, but I am having a good time with it. It is nothing like the first two games but honestly, after hearing for the last ten years how unbelievably horrible it is, perhaps my expectations were so low that anything would have impressed me. I have been playing it on medium difficulty for about an hour and a half now and am quite enjoying it. It's a fun, over-the-top game. I don't think it deserved the hate that it got. Maybe it shouldn't have been a Soldier of Fortune game.

It came out in the same month and year as Call of Duty 4 : Modern Warfare and Crysis. The bar for a shooter was very high and while it is fun for turning your brain off and shooting things it had been left in the dust by the competition.

It wasn't even in the same league of the previous entries, 5 years after the last one.
While a "playable" budget title, it wasn't sold as one back then, at $40 MSRP (at least $20 more than it should have gone, IMHO).
Besides, there are unresolved bugs, one of which doesn't allow you to beat a boss fight, stopping your progress right there. Appears in a small number of cases, so no one knows if you're going to suffer it or not until you reach that fight.