After clambering up a ladder to enter via a second-story window, you strap on night-vision goggles and begin violently killing two to four plainclothes terrorists per floor. You may be used to elaborate, even disturbing death animations when killing armored soldiers in modern video games, but the detailed graphics pipeline attached to this game's night-vision mode—with incredible light-bounce effects that add a certain realism—emphasizes just how disturbing these enemies' non-armored deaths look.
One apparent terrorist uses a woman as his human shield. Since his head is exposed, you aim accordingly, and down he goes... but then the woman bounces off that man toward a table, hands reaching for a gun. Thump-thump-thump, go the rounds into her body, after which she slumps over in horrific fashion. Two rooms later, a woman holds a crying baby up, and she turns out to be the only person in this compound to not take any bullets. (We're not sure how the final game will handle players who try to—ugh—shoot the baby.)
A few more floors and kills later, the mission is clear, and all targets have been neutralized. As if to make players feel better about this stomach-turning level of brutality, Price concludes the mission by reassuring you: that last woman you violently shot was about to trigger a bomb and blow the whole townhouse up. You had to, soldier.
The sequence's tension is compounded by an impressive destructible-wall physics pipeline, which lets both your squad and your targets shoot through walls—and thus reveal smoke, light-shaft, and particle effects with every round pumped through the building's plaster-and-fiberglass foundation. It's not just the walls. When one enemy crawls beneath a bed, you rain hellfire through its wood-and-mattress foundation to take him out.
