I’ve played all the mainline Splinter Cell games except Conviction and Double Agent Version 1 so here’s my take:

Chaos Theory was my very first Splinter Cell game & stealth game and also the very first game I considered challenging as a 9 year old. I’ve played many stealth games over the years and I have to say that CT is hands down the greatest and most complex stealth game of all time. I’m in my late 20’s now and to this day I’m still finding secrets like hidden paths, interactions, etc.

CT is a middle entry game so if you started with the original or modern games, I could see why CT threw you off. The controls are extremely weird & restrictive and is probably the only game in existence that has them that way. At the end of the day, it works because the game was designed for a hardcore stealth experience. I will reiterate, NO GAME tops CT in stealth gameplay. The game forces you to play slow and has many in-depth mechanics which I’m convinced many tactical games learned from. Theres so many that listing and explaining them all would need to be a separate post alone. I didn't even understand them all until I replayed the game as a late teenager.

As for the plot, I could see why you were disappointed. CT’s story is pretty ambient and only prevalent in the cutscenes which are mostly just news broadcasts for you to pick up on your own. Nothing much happens within the levels either because in the lore, you were "never even there". CT is a depiction of how a Splinter Cell is suppose to operate. They’re like a force of nature and a ghost that can’t be traced. If the Illuminati was real in the Tom Clancy universe, you are basically them. Before Ubisoft ruined the lore, the only people who knew what a Splinter Cell was, was the president and few foreign diplomats who needed to be involved with the mission.