The demo cuts to a rooftop a few minutes later. The squad are now under fire from a single sniper who, in a neat reversal of the previous action, is blasting away chunks of their own cover. One by one they crawl (you can go prone!) to the edge of the building, to a concrete lip that provides some shelter. Even so, it’s crumbling under the sniper’s attention: each huge, concussive bullet blast sends chunks of wall spilling over the rooftop. Black collects a rocket launcher, the team blindfires over the wall, and he pops up and launches. He’s not entirely accurate, but it doesn’t matter. The entire facade of the building the sniper was stationed in shivers, then falls off. Dust billows out from each storey, and the floors crumble, making the exposed inside of the building frown like big, sad face. Yeah, he’s dead.

Black barely needed to aim: as long as he hit the building that sniper was going to suffer, and I now know a lot more about the subtleties of scenery destruction in Frosbite 2.0: it works on a both a smaller scale than in Bad Company 2, and a larger. The building they just destroyed was much bigger than those of BC2, yet it didn’t collapse all the way. It was later confirmed to me that while you can do a lot of damage to the city structures, only prescribed ones will be able to fully collapse. The rest will just turn into swiss cheese, at least enabling new hollows of cover to be carved out of their husks.

It’s not all wanton destruction. The next section brings a surprising change of pace: Black is alone in a building, following a wire to a bomb. This disarming sequence is interrupted by an insurgent, and there’s a brutal quicktime event, left and right mouse buttons controlling his fisty pummelling. Ordinarily I would be wary of filler material like this, but it comes as a welcome respite from the firefights and carnage. It’s also amusing that in a game built for large-scale destruction, Black is actually stopping a bomb from going off.

The calm doesn’t last. Black runs out into a large battle on the city streets, abandoned cars and military vehicles providing cover. Rather than freeform, it feels tightly scripted: he moves through it to a bridge overlooking the road, firing down onto the rushing insurgents, thinning their assault. The ratatat of his rifle is drowned out by the whumph of the helicopter that backs him up. Even so, the insurgents rush under the bridge and over to the other side. Black retreats from the bridge to the street, to the abandoned military vehicle. Again, it feels more like a scripted event than an emergent battle, but it has a point. He’s holding off the insurgents, rattling off bullets as the support helicopter comes back for a second strafing run at the enemies.