The first thing you’ll notice is how breathtakingly massive and believable the city looks. You will take several helicopter rides throughout the campaign in different modes of daylight, and the city is sprawled out all the way to the horizon with buildings and streets. Fires and smoke curl up into the sky from factories.
Lighting is extremely realistic and very well done. The game’s missions are linear over a 48-hour period, so you get to see the entire palette of lighting. Sundown, twilight, morning, and even late afternoon lighting are very realistic and visually satisfying.
The odd thing that contrasts such a believable city is how absolutely empty it is. This is supposed to be a bustling metropolis, but the ONLY inhabitants of the city are a handful of rebel fighters.
The amazing visuals are what make the game so satisfying to play. The character models are extremely detailed and have excellent motion-capture animation. The weapon models are perfectly recreated. The environments are very well done, from the sense of heat in the Mexican afternoon, to the massive polygon count of the city’s details.
These extensive environments are also interactive: bullet holes are left in walls, certain building materials are good candidates for the “wall-piercing” sniper bullets, and of course every vehicle is destructible (you can usually activate a car’s alarm by shooting it a few times or taking out its windows).
The lighting is absolutely breathtaking and provide realistic visuals. Every surface is normal or bump mapped, so nearly every surface has texture and reacts to light. Nearly every object reacts to the daylight environment, from the orange glow of a hazy afternoon, reflecting the environment in glass, or glare off direct sunlight. The city realistiaclly looks hot and dusty in the day, and satisfyingly cool and dry at night.
The different time of day colors the environments realistically… a hot afternoon will appear orange, but the long shadows are a cold purple. The lighting system also makes use of HDR-like rendering, a rendering technique that mimicks dialating pupils, so you may be temporarially blinded going from a dark area to a bright area, or if you catch the sun’s bright glare.
In 720p the visuals are gorgeous. I didn’t notice much of an improvement at 1080i, and there was some noticeable slowdown during complex scenes, such as tank explosions or massive troop movement. It appears even the power of the 360 hits a ceiling in this game.
