I thought the first one was pretty fun at times. Those times when you would fight a bunch of Koreans all alone, that is.
As far as calling it a "Call of Duty clone", that'd include a large percentage of FPSes having nothing to do with CoD-like gameplay. Looking at the original Crysis, there were: no cutscenes every 10 seconds, mostly no waiting for people to open doors for your stupid ass, much more open environment and destructive physics on certain buildings giving some tension to fights against vehicles (provided your physics setting was at least medium). Oh, and also fighting squid-like aliens.
The suit was sort of gimmicky at times, yeah, but in a fun way. Maximum strength ain't ever gonna be really useful in warfare with full automatic weapons, but it sure is fun to punch your way through a wall, grab someone by the neck and hurl him 10 meters into rocks.
I dunno about Crysis 2 singleplayer yet. But the multiplayer demo sucked. 2 out of 3 graphical "settings" made the bloom so bad all I could see was grey blurs on a white background. And the server browser was the worst I've ever seen, it never displayed pings for me and never showed accurate player amounts. Although they made jumping and climbing work pretty smoothly, I guess.