Graphically the game is an absolute stunner and the new engine for the game matches if not exceeds what's available on the market. Good looks aside the most important part of the new engine is how well it handles destructible environments. Well, it's more like mostly destructible environments because while you can blow the walls of a building down, you can't actually destroy the structure completely (like you will be able to do in Red Faction Guerilla). This looks to have been done for gameplay reasons as I'm sure the engine could handle it. This eliminates one of my biggest peeves with the series in that a three foot tall fence could stop tanks and APC's in every previous iteration of the game and it's nice to be able to crush fences, posts, and tree with abandon.
Being able to modify the environment in this fashion really changes the game quite a bit as you no longer have any kind of reliable cover any more. This makes armored vehicles in the game more deadly. No longer can you run into a building and expect to be safe from a tank as they can bring the walls down around you. There's nothing like being the gunner in a tank and watching a tank shell tear open a giant hole in a wall, exposing a squad of soldiers to my machine gun fire. Good times. good times.
The audio in the demo is excellent as DICE has re-worked all the audio for the guns which now sound chunkier and more realistic. It's hard to describe the exact changes but the gun fire sounds more real than previous games. Vehicle sounds are also much improved as you can hear the engines switch gears when you change directions on a tank and some of the other vehicles. The only downer of the sound is that one of the audio engineers decided to added a little whistling sound at the end of some of the radio communication transmissions which for some reason feels like it's drilling a hole between my eyes. I don't know if this is done for realism sake or not but for some reason every time I hear it I cringe.
The game features five different classes. Assault, Recon, Demolitions, Support, and Spec Ops. These are basically the same five classes the franchise has used in the past and veterans of the series will feel right at home. Also back from previous games is the rank system where you earn points for completing objectives and killing enemy soldiers. Promotions are earned at certain point thresholds and players receive an unlock point with each promotion. These points can be used to unlock a new weapon or piece of equipment. It's a fairly solid system and it does create the "only a few more kills until I get an unlock and gain access to that new assault rifle" mentality the previous games had. However you do have to exit the game to unlock something which is a bit disappointing. It would be cool to be able to unlock a new weapon between matches much like how Call of Duty 4 handles it.
I'm not going to touch the overblown drama of having to pay to unlock the five weapons that come standard with the limited edition version of the game except to say that as long as the weapons don't screw up the balance of the gameplay then people have nothing to worry about.
While I'm still not entirely comfortable playing the game on the Xbox 360 I do admit that DICE has the makings of a fantastic game here. There are enough new ideas to differentiate it from other genre favorites like Call of Duty 4 and Frontlines: Fuel of War. I think FPS gamers will dig the game if DICE can deliver more high quality maps, game modes, and a decent single player campaign (something they've never done in the past). Worse case they've created an excellent showcase for their Frostbite technology.
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