The first thing that we noticed, looking down on the streets below, is how bright the city looked in the glaring summer sun. Girard explained that the team was really striving to get the feel of how hot Mexico can be, deep in the city where the heat bounces between the asphalt and the buildings. To this end, high-dynamic range lighting comes into play, with brilliant light absolutely blasting off of bright surfaces.
The effect also has a bit of relevance to gameplay. If you step into shadows, your in-game eyes adjust after a moment to the dimmer light. Then, while standing in the shadows, if you turn around and look out across a sunlit plaza, the light is absolutely intense -- sometimes obscuring figures in the distance. Some may think the effect is overdone but it definitely gave Advanced Warfighter a style of its own.
You fight from a first-person view, but with a whole new level of control. You can dive into prone position, or do a backslide (basically sliding on your butt into a crouch position) during which you can keep your guns forward and firing. You also have complete control over leaning: you can press a key to start leaning, and then instead of just being able to lean left and right, you can also lean up or down. In this way, you can take advantage of all kinds of cover, such as hiding behind the hood of a car and occasionally popping up to fire, or hiding behind the wheel of a truck and leaning down to rip a few shots off.
Speaking of cars, destroying one gave us a good chance to see how interactive the environments are. You could shoot out all the windows individually (glass shatters and spills), shoot the tires, knock the wheels from the rim, open the doors to hide behind them, blow the doors off, blow the hood off... and basically reduce a luxury car to a smoldering heap in a minute or so. Pop a cap in a parking meter and coins spill out, using real physics so that they clatter off of nearby cars.
